Nicholas Sauter, a computer senior scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, is co-leading a team working to provide a better way for scientists to study the structures of the many materials that don’t form tidy single crystals. Their new technique, called small-molecule serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography, or smSFX, supercharges traditional crystallography with the addition of custom-built image processing algorithms and an X-ray free electron laser (XFEL). In a paper published in Nature, the team demonstrated proof-of-principle for smSFX and reported the previously unknown structures of two metal-organic materials known as chacogenolates.