Apr 052018
 

Kiaora Tolmie recieving the CCG Poster PrizeThe 2018 Meeting of the British Crystallographic Association was held at Warwick University where Chem. Cryst. was well represented.  The meeting started with the Young Crystallographers Satellite meeting, during which Lewis Morgan’s oral presentation was so “eggsellent” that he won the Industrial Group Prize for the best talk, and with it, the dubious honour of presenting it again as a plenary in the main meeting.

At the conference dinner Kiaora Tolmie received a CCG CrystEngComm poster prize for her poster on hard-to-crystallize materials, and James Bird was awarded the YCG I’m-a-scientist-get-me-out-of here prize for the poster presenter who most clearly and enthusiastically communicated their results.

Congratulations to all three winners!

 

Lewis Morgan delivering his prize-winning presentation at the BCA Spring Meeting 2018

Lewis Morgan delivering his prize-winning presentation

 

A full list of the presentations from Chem. Cryst.:

George A. Sackman & Richard I. Cooper
Distinguishing Disorder: A Molecular Dynamics Approach (Poster Presentation)

Kiaora L. M. Tolmie & Richard I. Cooper
Structure Determination of Hard-to-Crystallize Materials (Poster Presentation)

Lewis C. F. Morgan, Jack N. Blandy, Claire A. Murray, Kirsten E. Christensen & Amber L. Thompson
Improving Our Understanding of Modulation in Molecular Materials (Poster & Oral Presentation)

James M. Bird & Richard I. Cooper
A Comparison of Molecular Dynamics Techniques for Simulation of Thermal Disorder in Molecular Crystals (Poster Presentation)

Oliver J. A. Bar & Richard I. Cooper
A Study of Phase Transitions in Organic and Metal-organic Inclusion Complexes through Molecular Dynamics Simulation (Poster Presentation)

Richard I. Cooper
CrysPy: CRYSTALS in Python (Poster Presentation)

Amber L. Thompson
When are Bad Data Good Data? (Keynote Oral Presentation)

Feb 192012
 

Dalton Trans. (2012), 41, 1951-1960.    [ doi:10.1039/C1DT11758K ]

Uranium complexes of bis(p-tert-butyl-salicylidene)-1,2-diphenylethylenediamine (1) and bis(salicylidene)-1,2-diphenylethylenediamine (2) have been synthesized and investigated by X-ray single crystal diffraction and MD calculations in Periodic Boundary Conditions. Both compounds form crystals which are densely packed and do not provide voids accessible to solvent molecules. The configurations adopted by 1 and 2 are determined by well defined T-shaped and π-stacking non covalent interactions between phenyl groups of adjacent molecules as well as by a network of hydrogen bonds. These interactions and the relative arrangements of the molecules, explain the packing in the crystal structures. Each uranyl moiety shows a penta-coordination in the equatorial plane perpendicular to the trans oxygens giving rise, in both compounds, to a bypiramidal geometry. As usual for this class of compounds, the 5th position is characterized by the presence of the coordinated solvent. The in silico simulations confirm this hypothesis in very fine details. Moreover, in 1, even the partial occupancy of the solvent molecule determined from the crystal structure refinement, was shown to be due to a constrained freedom of motion of the solvent molecule that can be reproduced by molecular dynamics. This suggests that the reported disorder is not due to a poor quality of the harvested crystals but to a structural feature. In further agreement with the above mentioned results, DFT calculations demonstrated that the molecular orbital configuration and energies suit the described properties of complexes 1 and 2 suggesting a potential enantioselective activity as already shown by molecules belonging to this class of compounds.

Electronic reprints

  • Oxford University Research Archive [direct pdf]

Publisher’s copy

Jan 012006
 

Francesco obtained his PhD in Rome and since 2004 is Assistant Professor at the Chemical Division of the Department of Pharmaceutical Science of the University of Catania, Italy. He spent some months during 2005 and 2006 in our lab to improve his knowledge of crystallography. His principal area of research is the comparison of experimental X-ray diffraction data with computationally simulated data. The prediction of crystal morphology, polymorphism, atomic displacement parameters (adp), as well as the physico-chemical properties of biologically active compounds are among his interests.