Abstract
The Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is a vast and ever growing compendium of accurate three-dimensional structures that has massive chemical diversity across organic and metal-organic compounds. For these reasons, the CSD is finding significant uses in chemical education, and these applications are reviewed. As part of the teaching initiative of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), a teaching subset of more than 500 CSD structures has been created that illustrate key chemical concepts, and a number of teaching modules have been devised that make use of this subset in a teaching environment. All of this material is freely available from the CCDC website, and the subset can be freely viewed and interrogated using WebCSD, an internet application for searching and displaying CSD information content. In some cases, however, the complete CSD System is required for specific educational applications, and some examples of these more extensive teaching modules are also discussed. The educational value of visualizing real three-dimensional structures, and of handling real experimental results, is stressed throughout.
Highlights
In June 1988, the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) published a series of eight papers arising from a symposium on teaching crystallography that was held at the 1987 Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association in Austin, Texas
In a purely crystallographic teaching context, the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) and other structural database resources, the Protein Data Bank (PDB; Berman et al, 2000), have been an integral part of a variety of schools and courses, such as the Intensive Courses in X-ray Crystallography given by the British and American Crystallographic Associations (BCA, ACA) and courses offered by other national groups
More advanced teaching applications require access to the complete CSD System, and this is supplied to individual institutions for a small cost-recovery fee which is further reduced for non-PhD-awarding institutions
Summary
In June 1988, the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) published a series of eight papers arising from a symposium on teaching crystallography that was held at the 1987 Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association in Austin, Texas. Because traditional classroom teaching examples instil a bias that chemical structure should be ‘ideal and perfect’, the use of real experimental results prepares students for the realities of research It is good for all students of chemistry and associated disciplines to develop a familiarity with the crystallographic method and its results, since crystallography is rarely taught as a sub-discipline at undergraduate or graduate level, but plays a crucial role in all branches of modern chemistry, as well as in structural biology, the pharmaceutical sciences and materials science. To address this educational potential, the CCDC has in recent years begun an outreach initiative, principally in structural chemistry and involving the symmetry aspects of the subject. Some of these presentations are referenced individually in this paper under the name of the presenting author
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