Materials scientists typically use solution-phase
transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to reveal the unique
physiochemical properties of three-dimensional (3-D) structures of
nanocrystals. In a new report on Science Advances, Cyril F. Reboul
and a research team at the Monash University, Australia, Seoul
National University, South Korea, and the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory U.S., developed a single-particle Brownian 3-D
reconstruction method. To accomplish this, they imaged ensembles of
colloidal nanocrystals using graphene liquid cell transmission
electron microscopy. The team obtained projection images of
differently rotated nanocrystals using a direct electron detector
to obtain an ensemble of 3-D reconstructions. In this work, they
introduced computational methods to successfully reconstruct 3-D
nanocrystals at atomic resolution and accomplished this by tracking
individual particles throughout time, while subtracting the
interfering background. The method could also identify/reject
low-quality images to facilitate tailored strategies for 2-D/3-D
alignment that differed from those in biological cryo-electron
microscopy. The team made the developments available through an
open-source software package known as SINGLE. The free software is
available on GitHub.
SINGLE: An open-source software package to identify the
atomic-resolution structure of nanocrystals
