Serial electron crystallography: merging diffraction data through rank aggregation

What is it about?

We are developing methods for collecting and processing serial crystallography data on an electron microscopes. One of the challenges we were facing is how to combine the data from 1000s of independent crystals into a single data set for structure analysis. In this article we describe a solution to this problem that is based on rank aggregation in order to obtain the most likely ranking of the reflections.

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Why is it important?

Our merging strategy overcomes some of the problems inherent to electron diffraction (i.e. dynamical scattering), but also addresses the problem that each individual pattern set will be scaled differently in a serial crystallography experiment. The fact that a large number of single electron diffraction patterns can be merged, enables serial electron crystallography for the structure analysis of polycrystalline materials.