X-ray crystallographic studies of compounds of biological interest.

Abstract

In her review of the years 1944 to 1947, Dr. Crowfoot (1) commented upon the progress which had been made in our knowledge of organic structures since the first of the Annual Review series (1936) by Sponsler & Dore and called attention to the increasing productivity in recent years which has resulted from the growing power of x-ray analytical methods. This accelerated output of structure determinations has continued during the years 1948 to 1950. The first issue of Acta Crystallographica appeared in 1948, and already more than 60 articles dealing with the crystal structures of organic compounds have been published in its pages alone. But the increased number of structure determinations is probably less significant than the greatly increased accuracy with which they can now be made. This increased accuracy may be largely attributed to improved computational techniques for refining atomic coordinates by the calculation of Fourier series or by the method of least squares (2).