Image processing and lattice determination for three-dimensional nanocrystals

Three-dimensional nanocrystals can be studied by electron diffraction using transmission cryo-electron microscopy. For molecular structure determination of proteins, such nanosized crystalline samples are out of reach for traditional single-crystal X-ray crystallography. For the study of materials that are not sensitive to the electron beam, software has been developed for determining the crystal lattice and orientation parameters. These methods require radiation-hard materials that survive careful orienting of the crystals and measuring diffraction of one and the same crystal from different, but known directions. However, as such methods can only deal with well-oriented crystalline samples, a problem exists for three-dimensional (3D) crystals of proteins and other radiation sensitive materials that do not survive careful rotational alignment in the electron microscope. Here, we discuss our newly released software AMP that can deal with nonoriented diffraction patterns, and we discuss the progress of our new preprocessing program that uses autocorrelation patterns of diffraction images for lattice determination and indexing of 3D nanocrystals.