In two Letters in Nature, scientists are reporting that they have been
able to reconstruct the structures of biological molecules using
femtosecond X-ray pulses. In the first Letter, they imaged nano-crystals of the photosystem I protein, part of the photosynthetic machinery. In the second, they were able to image individual single mimiviruses, part of a family of giant viruses. We seem to be well on the
way to single molecule structural imaging.

X-ray diffraction crystallography has been around since the 1920s and
is a useful tool for determining the structures of molecules. The basic
idea is that the photons diffract as they strike the ordered structure
of crystals. The resulting diffraction pattern is unique to the
structure of the crystal. So, a crystal of a protein creates a unique diffraction pattern that tells us where the protein’s atoms reside.

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X-ray laser finds structure of a single virus as it vaporizes it