Crystallography in Chemistry; Current Profile of Chemical Crystallography

Chemistry Central Journal themed issue: Current Topics in Chemical Crystallography

Preamble It was a pleasure to be invited to act as editor for this themed issue in which we aim to assemble a series of invited and submitted papers which provide a look at some of the current research efforts defining the subject of “Chemical Crystallography”. Of course, the timing of this is to make a positive contribution to the celebration of this special year, 2014 the UNESCO Year of Cryst...

Chemical Crystallography

Automated chemical crystallography.

The first fully automated small-molecule robotic X-ray diffractometer is described. After demonstrating the utility of the instrument using multiple samples of ammonium bitartrate, we investigated the conformational chirality of diphenyl dichalcogenide (E(2)Ph(2), where E = S, Se, or Te). Structural and computational studies suggest that the two enantiomers are energetically indistinguishable. ...

Structure validation in chemical crystallography

Automated structure validation was introduced in chemical crystallography about 12 years ago as a tool to assist practitioners with the exponential growth in crystal structure analyses. Validation has since evolved into an easy-to-use checkCIF/PLATON web-based IUCr service. The result of a crystal structure determination has to be supplied as a CIF-formatted computer-readable file. The checking...

Chemical crystallography and crystal engineering

Today, there is very little doubt that chemistry owes as much to crystallography as crystallography does to chemistry. This mutual synergy defines modern chemical crystallography.