X-ray lasers offer new capabilities in understanding the structure of biological 
systems, complex materials and matter under extreme conditions. Very short and 
extremely bright, coherent X-ray pulses can be used to outrun key damage 
processes and obtain a single diffraction pattern from a large macromolecule, a 
virus or a cell before the sample explodes and turns into plasma. The continuous 
diffraction pattern of non-crystalline objects permits oversampling and direct 
phase retrieval. Here we show that high-quality diffraction data can be obtained 
with a single X-ray pulse from a non-crystalline biological sample, a single 
mimivirus particle, which was injected into the pulsed beam of a hard-X-ray 
free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source. Calculations indicate that 
the energy deposited into the virus by the pulse heated the particle to over 
100,000 K after the pulse had left the sample. The reconstructed exit wavefront 
(image) yielded 32-nm full-period resolution in a single exposure and showed no 
measurable damage. The reconstruction indicates inhomogeneous arrangement of 
dense material inside the virion. We expect that significantly higher 
resolutions will be achieved in such experiments with shorter and brighter 
photon pulses focused to a smaller area. The resolution in such experiments can 
be further extended for samples available in multiple identical copies.