In the centennial year of Max von Laue’s discovery that X-ray diffraction can be used to unravel the atomic architecture of molecules, a new approach to the determination of high-resolution structures has been demonstrated. An international team of researchers has analyzed tiny protein crystals using short pulses of X-ray light from the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser, the US Department of Energy’s 300 million dollar Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford.
