Coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) allows the retrieval of the structure of an isolated object, such as a macromolecule, from its diffraction pattern. CDI requires the fulfilment of two conditions: the imaging radiation must be coherent and the object must be isolated. We discuss that it is possible to directly retrieve the molecular structure from its diffraction pattern which was acquired neither with coherent radiation nor from an individual molecule, provided the molecule exhibits periodicity in one direction, as in the case of fiber diffraction. We demonstrate that by applying iterative phase retrieval methods to a fiber diffraction pattern, the repeating unit, that is, the molecule structure, can directly be reconstructed without any prior modeling. As an example, we recover the structure of the DNA double helix in three-dimensions from its two-dimensional X-ray fiber diffraction pattern, Photograph 51, acquired in the famous experiment by Raymond Gosling and Rosalind Franklin, at a resolution of 3.4 Angstrom.
In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick deduced the structure of B-DNA from its X-ray fiber diffraction pattern which was acquired by Raymond Gosling, a PhD student of Rosalind Franklin [1][2][3]. Fiber diffraction [4][5][6] is employed for studying the molecular structure of elongated assemblies of repeating units. In the case of a subunit consisting of a few atoms, such as the DNA nucleotide, the atomic positions can be determined by combining X-ray diffraction data with the known chemical composition of the unit. In the case of larger subunits, such as proteins, the fiber diffraction pattern can provide the information about the shape of the subunit. However, to determine its detailed structure X-ray crystallography data are required. Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) [7] is a relatively modern technique which unlike other techniques allows to directly visualize the structure of an isolated object, a macromolecule for example [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. In CDI, the structure of a sample is reconstructed from its diffraction pattern by applying numerical iterative phase retrieval algorithms. For realizing CDI, two requirements must to be fulfilled: the object under study must be isolated and the imaging radiation must be coherent, although some attempts to employ partially coherent waves have also been reported [18]. The second requirement of a high brilliance coherent X-ray source is fulfilled by using a synchrotron or one of the recently build X-ray free-electron lasers. The very short Xray pulses of the latter are to be used for imaging individual biological macromolecules [19].
In this study we show that a fiber diffraction pattern can be treated as if it was acquired in a CDI experiment. As an example, we reconstruct the three-dimensional (3D) DNA double helical structure from its twodimensional (2D) fiber diffraction pattern by applying a phase retrieval algorithm. In this way, no modeling is thus required. The oversampling condition normally needed in the case of CDI can be relaxed when imaging a periodical structure like a DNA. Moreover, the molecule under study does not need to be isolated; the molecular structure can be directly recovered from its fiber diffraction pattern, a diffraction pattern created by an ensemble of molecules acquired with a partially coherent radiation.
A fiber diffraction experiment, which typically employs a partially coherent X-ray source, is sketched in Fig. 1(a). A coherence length which ensures coherent addition of the waves scattered by adjacent atoms to create a peak in the diffraction pattern is sufficient. The molecules in a fiber are approximately aligned along the fiber axis, and, unlike in a crystal, they are randomly rotated along their axes. Fibers show helical symmetry [4][5][6]. The molecular structure is recovered in a similar to crystallographic experiment approach, starting with an initial model which is then refined to achieve a good agreement between atomic positions and intensity maxima in the fiber diffraction pattern. Fig. 1. Sketches of (a) fiber diffraction, as re-created from the setup of Gosling and Franklin for their DNA X-ray fiber diffraction experiment [20] and (b) coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) experiments. In a fiber diffraction experiment, the individual molecules are stretched and arranged into a fiber with a random rotation around their axis. The larger insets depict B-DNA structures rendered from the atomic positions provided by Drew et al [21]. The smaller insets illustrate the distribution of the complex coherence function (CCF) shown in red. In a fiber diffraction experiment, because of the partial coherence, the contrast of the interference pattern created by the waves scattered at different atoms within the molecule is proportional to the distance between the atoms, quickly decaying to zero as the distance between the atoms increases. In a CDI experiment, only one individual molecule is imaged at a time. The spatial coherence length in CDI is large enough to cover the entire sample area so that the waves scattered at all atoms of the molecule interfere at a degree of coherence close to 1.
A CDI experiment is sketched is in Fig. 1(b). Here, a coherent wave is employed, and the scattered wavefront in the far-field distribution is given by the Fourier transform of the distribution of atoms within the molecule. If the complex-valued distribution of the scattered wavefront could be detected, a simple inverse Fourier transform would give the molecular structure. However, since only the intensity can be recorded, the phase information is missing, but can be recovered provided the intensity distribution is sampled at a frequency finer than at least twice the Nyquist frequency (oversampled) [7]. A finer sampling of the intensity in the far-field (Fourier) domain is equivalent to zero-padding of the sample in the object domain. In reality it means that the sample must be isolated and surrounded by a non-scattering med
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