EXtra-Xwiz: A Tool to Streamline Serial Femtosecond Crystallography Workflows at European XFEL

X-ray free electron lasers deliver photon pulses that are bright enough to observe diffraction from extremely small crystals at a time scale that outruns their destruction. As crystals are continuously replaced, this technique is termed serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX). Due to its high pulse repetition rate, the European XFEL enables the collection of rich and extensive data sets, which are suited to study various scientific problems, including ultra-fast processes. The enormous data rate, data complexity, and the nature of the pixelized multimodular area detectors at the European XFEL pose severe challenges to users. To streamline the analysis of the SFX data, we developed the semiautomated pipeline EXtra-Xwiz around the established CrystFEL program suite, thereby processing diffraction patterns on detector frames into structure factors. Here we present EXtra-Xwiz, and we introduce its architecture and use by means of a tutorial. Future plans for its development and expansion are also discussed.

Automated summary

Researchers have developed a semi-automated pipeline called EXtra-Xwiz to streamline and accelerate the analysis of serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) data, which is crucial for experiments with high data complexity like the European XFEL.