Low-energy electron holographic imaging of individual tobacco mosaic virions

Abstract

Modern structural biology relies on NMR, X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy for gaining information on biomolecules at nanometer, sub-nanometer or atomic resolution. All these methods, however, require averaging over a vast ensemble of entities and hence knowledge on the conformational landscape of an individual particle is lost. Unfortunately, there are now strong indications that even X-ray free electron lasers will not be able to image individual molecules but will require nanocrystal samples. Here, we show that non-destructive structural biology of single particles has now become possible by means of low-energy electron holography. As an example, individual tobacco mosaic virions deposited on ultraclean freestanding graphene are imaged at one nanometer resolution revealing structural details arising from the helical arrangement of the outer protein shell of the virus. Since low-energy electron holography is a lens-less technique and since electrons with a deBroglie wavelength of approximately 1 Angstrom do not impose radiation damage to biomolecules, the method has the potential for Angstrom resolution imaging of single biomolecules.

References in corpus (7)

• Solution to the twin image problem in holography
• Practical algorithms for simulation and reconstruction of digital in-line holograms
• Graphene as a transparent conductive support for studying biological molecules by transmission electron microscopy
• Low-energy electron transmission imaging of clusters on free-standing graphene
• Graphene Unit Cell Imaging by Holographic Coherent Diffraction
• Holography and Coherent Diffraction with Low-Energy Electrons: A Route towards Structural Biology at the Single Molecule Level
• On artefact-free reconstruction of low-energy (30-250 eV) electron holograms

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Imaging proteins at the truly single-molecule level
• A nanofocused plasmon-driven sub-10 femtosecond electron point source
• Coherent properties of a tunable low energy electron matter wave source
• Phase retrieval methods applied to coherent imaging
• How to image single isolated atoms by using coherent low-energy electrons