Structure determination of complex biological molecules is the largest application of synchrotron X-ray radiation. About 1/4 of X-ray beam lines worldwide are dedicated to macromolecular crystallography. At the third-generation synchrotrons, radiation damage limits the crystal lifetime to minutes, making further improvements in X-ray source insignificant. With the fraction-of-second individual image exposure time, detection systems and data analysis are the main experimental limitations. Currently installed detectors can read a 36M-pixel diffraction image in one second, making it possible to acquire Gigabytes of data per minute, but in practice exceeding the capacity of data transport, analysis and storage systems.

The experimental problems arise from the necessity to measure the diffraction from marginal-quality crystals. The ability to measure the diffraction is constantly challenged by the biology advancing to study more complex, often imperfectly ordered, systems of molecules. The resulting diffraction is very weak, barely resolved and changing due to the radiation damage.

Data analysis has to provide the minimum error estimates of the diffraction signal and also to be computationally efficient. Determining the structure of macromolecules requires iteratively solving a highly convoluted series of sub-problems. The solutions are a combination of purely experimental approaches with calculations based on complex, theoretical thinking. The limitations of detection systems propagate throughout the analysis, with different detector characteristics limiting particular calculations.

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