The structure of tick-borne encephalitis virus determined at X-ray free-electron lasers. Simulations

The study of virus structures by X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) has attracted increased attention in recent decades. Such experiments are based on the collection of 2D diffraction patterns measured at the detector following the application of femtosecond X-ray pulses to biological samples. To prepare an experiment at the European XFEL, the diffraction data for the tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) was simulated with different parameters and the optimal values were identified. Following the necessary steps of a well established data-processing pipeline, the structure of TBEV was obtained. In the structure determination presented, a priori knowledge of the simulated virus orientations was used. The efficiency of the proposed pipeline was demonstrated.

Classification of diffraction patterns using a convolutional neural network in single-particle-imaging experiments performed at X-ray free-electron lasers

Single particle imaging (SPI) at X-ray free-electron lasers is particularly well suited to determining the 3D structure of particles at room temperature. For a successful reconstruction, diffraction patterns originating from a single hit must be isolated from a large number of acquired patterns. It is proposed that this task could be formulated as an image-classification problem and solved using convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. Two CNN configurations are developed: one that maximizes the F1 score and one that emphasizes high recall. The CNNs are also combined with expectation-maximization (EM) selection as well as size filtering. It is observed that the CNN selections have lower contrast in power spectral density functions relative to the EM selection used in previous work. However, the reconstruction of the CNN-based selections gives similar results. Introducing CNNs into SPI experiments allows the reconstruction pipeline to be streamlined, enables researchers to classify patterns on the fly, and, as a consequence, enables them to tightly control the duration of their experiments. Incorporating non-standard artificial-intelligence-based solutions into an existing SPI analysis workflow may be beneficial for the future development of SPI experiments.