Berkeley Lab researchers, in collaboration with scientists from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Max Planck Institute, have demonstrated that fluctuation X-ray scattering is capable of capturing the behavior of biological systems in unprecedented detail. Although this technique was first proposed more than four decades ago, its implementation was hindered by the lack of sufficiently powerful X-ray sources and associated detector technology, sample delivery methods, and the means to analyze the data. The team developed a novel mathematical and data analyses framework that was applied to data obtained from DOE’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC. This breakthrough was recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).