Dec 232015
 

ecrislaThe 3rd Edition of the School of Crystallisation and Crystallography for Latin America organised by Prof. Carlos Campos was held in December in Florianópolis, Brazil. The quiet setting in a monastery south of the main centre of Florianópolis provided ideal conditions for an intensive week of crystallography lectures, posters and discussions. Richard Cooper attended to lecture on crystallographic modelling and structure solution methods.

Jun 232015
 

Fluoride–alcohol complexChemical Science 2015, 6, 5293-5302
[doi:10.1039/c5sc01812a]

The nucleophilic reactivity of fluoride ion is altered in the presence of hydrogen-bond donors, including alcohols. Relatively little is known about the coordination involved; to rectify this, the X-ray structures of fourteen novel fluoride–alcohol complexes with tetrabutylammonium as the counterion have been determined. The coordination number varies from two to four depending on the steric bulk of the alcohol and is closely linked to trends in reactivity. This diversity in coordination stoichiometry is unprecedented but significant, as it implies differences in the ability of the fluoride-alcohol complexes to dissociate in solution with release of a more active and/or selective fluoride source.

Publisher’s copy

May 302015
 

ccChemistry Central Journal 2015, 9:30 [ doi:10.1186/s13065-015-0105-4 ]

The size and complexity of molecules being studied by single crystal diffraction is growing year by year, resulting in an increase in the difficulties encountered during structure determination. From the crystallisation itself and sample handling, to structure solution and refinement, specific problems due to larger molecules are discussed.

During refinement, several methods are available to deal with the problems encountered with large structures within the software CRYSTALS. Recent developments in precision and speed during the least squares in CRYSTALS is helping the structural scientist to deal with larger structures more efficiently.

Publisher’s copy (Open Access)

Apr 032015
 

gezzaCongratulations to Sophie Gearing who won an RSC CrystEngComm poster prize at the British Crystallographic Association Meeting in York for her poster “Does it Crystallise?” which presented studies of the crystallinity in a set of molecular materials.

Her research tests predictions made in recent research by Jerome Wicker by using combinatorial synthesis to access a range of chemically similar materials with different crystallisability, and assessing crystallinity using a variety of analytical techniques.

Mar 202015
 

Co-crystal Palace (with two players loaned from Real Space Madrid) lost graciously to visiting team West Bromwich Synchrotron on 20th March 2015.

Mar 202015
 

FullSizeRenderCongratulations to Karim Sutton for passing his D.Phil examination on Friday on his thesis “Determining Structure and Atomic Properties of Materials using Resonant X-ray Diffraction“.

Feb 032015
 

crystal_vs_notAnnotated articles are based on research from a range of Royal Society of Chemistry journals that has been re-written into a standard, accessible format.

An annotated article on predicting and controlling the crystallinity of molecular materials by Jerome Wicker and Richard Cooper aims to help readers to understand the research the journal article is based on, and how to read and understand journal articles. Our research article was originally published in CrystEngComm.