Years Of Crystallography Research Articles

Open Access Resources for Crystallography Education in Interdisciplinary College Courses: Crystallographic Databases and 3D Printed Models

ABSTRACTComplementing a multitude of activities around the International Year of Crystallography, we report here on a few resources that are helpful for integrating basic crystallography into interdisciplinary college education. We concentrate on four resources with which we are directly involved. The Crystallography Open Database (COD) features currently more than 295,000 entries and has over the last decade developed into the world’s premier open-access source for the structures of small molecules and small to medium sized unit cell crystals. ‘Educational offshoots’ of the COD with approximately a thousand entries combined provide structural information on small molecules, selected macromolecules, crystal structures, grain boundaries, and crystal morphologies in the well documented Crystallographic Information Framework (CIF) file format. This information can be displayed interactively on the website http://nanocrystallography.research.pdx.edu and freely downloaded. Files that allow for the printing of selected database entries on any 3D printer have been added to this site and are also freely downloadable. These files were created with the programs Cif2VRML and WinXMorph that convert CIF files directly into 3D printing files. Interested college educators are invited to visit our open access crystallography resource portal and suggest other resources that should receive wider exposure over this portal.

The Next 100 Years of Crystallography: How the Heck should I Know?

“There was a door to which I found no key: There was the veil through which I might not see.”舲 - Omar Khayyam“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” [Matthew 6:34]“Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.” 舲- Samuel Johnson“I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.” 舲- Patrick Henry“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”舲 - Albert Einstein“When men speak of the future, the gods laugh.” 舲- Chinese Proverb“L'avenir est comme le reste: il n'est plus ce qu'il etait” - Paul Valery“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” 舲- Yogi Berra

Crystals on the cover 2014

Welcome to 2014, the International Year of Crystallography! In honor of this momentous year, our traditional crystals cover (the best from 2013) takes a new form: crystal images are projected onto a solid figure. The images featured are from the following articles: Baelen et al. (2013 ▶), Bandeiras et al. (2013 ▶), Choi et al. (2013 ▶), Degtjarik et al. (2013 ▶), Ha et al. (2013 ▶), Haikarainen et al. (2013 ▶), Huang et al. (2013 ▶), Iourin et al. (2013 ▶), Kikuchi et al. (2013 ▶), Li et al. (2013 ▶), Liu et al. (2013 ▶), Saijo-Hamano et al. (2013 ▶), Sartmatova et al. (2013 ▶), Shan et al. (2013 ▶), Squeglia et al. (2013 ▶), Trastoy et al. (2013 ▶) and Vengadesan et al. (2013 ▶). Also, in honor of the International Year of Crystallography, Acta Crystallographica Section F will be publishing a series of articles on the state of the art of macromolecular crystallization. The series begins in this issue with an introductory article written by Drs Alexander McPherson and Jose Gavira. Throughout 2014 and into 2015 one article per month will be published on important aspects of crystallization. You will note that the Editorial Board includes a new Section Editor, Professor William Hunter of the University of Dundee. His fellow editors welcome him to the team and look forward to working with him. Finally, we would all like to thank to our authors, Co-editors, reviewers (especially our review panel) and the editorial staff in Chester for all their hard work during 2013.

The FEBS Journal: passing the editorial baton

Seamus Martin, the new Editor-in-Chief of FEBS Journal, outlines his plans for the journal and pays tribute to his predecessor Richard Perham.

100 years of crystallography: the IUCr launches a comprehensive open-access journal, IUCrJ.

IUCrJ is a fully open-access journal that aims to publish high-quality structural science papers. It has been launched for the International Year of Crystallography (IYCr2014).

Big changes are ahead – a new format for crystallization communications inActa Cryst. F

The coming year 2014 will be an important year for crystallography as the scientific community throughout the world celebrates the International Year of Crystallography. Acta Cryst. F will commemorate this special event with a series of articles defining the current state-of-the-art in macromolecular crystallization, with one article appearing per month throughout 2014 and into 2015. We expect this series to be a useful resource for our readership and the wider structural biology community alike. Stay tuned. We have also been working diligently over the past two or three years to finalize new requirements and a new format for our regular articles. Maybe some of you have attended the presentations given by us at various meetings or workshops about the publication tool publBio (http://publbio.iucr.org). publBio is designed to make the preparation and submission of an article much more simple and straightforward than ever before, be it a structural or a crystallization communication. The latest version not only guides authors through the requirements for each article type but also provides a means of submitting the article directly to Acta Cryst. F, thus simplifying the first stages of the submission process. The IUCr Word template now also has some of the functionality of publBio and, just like publBio, offers the option of utilizing data from an existing PDB deposition or an mmCIF file when creating the tables in your article. In July this year, we published a contribution by Janet Newman and colleagues entitled Crystallization reports are the backbone of Acta F, but do they have any spine? (Newman et al., 2013 ▶; Weiss & Einspahr, 2013 ▶). The central message of this paper was that the information content of crystallization communications published in Acta Cryst. F varies widely. While this may not seem troubling at first glance, the notion that as many as 60% of these articles lack some essential information sparked some concern. With publBio, we have a tool that will allow us to address this issue efficiently and effectively, and that will also make a major contribution to correcting the problem. We feel that the time has come to take advantage of this by making publBio (or its counterpart in the IUCr Word template) mandatory for writing and submitting crystallization communications from 1 January 2014. We expect that you will enjoy working with publBio and we are looking forward to working with you to refine and improve it. From our perspective, another major advance is that publBio will make clear exactly what data are needed for an acceptable crystallization communication. There will of course be situations in which certain data items may not be necessary or may be unavailable, but these ‘exceptions to the rules’ are exactly those about which authors need to confer with Co-editors. Therefore, we ask our authors to make full use of publBio to ease the burden of creating their publications. Finally, we thank our authors for their continued support of our journal and wish you all Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays. We look forward to 2014 with anticipation of all the new things this New Year will bring.

One hundred years of X-ray diffraction, 50 years of structural biology

Since the pioneering diffraction experiments led by Max von Laue in 1912, X-ray crystallography has progressed with a spectacular pace, opening research, and application perspectives in fields such as materials science, chemistry, mineralogy, environmental sciences, biotechnology and biomedicine. Such developments have been supported by discoveries in both the theoretical and experimental branches of science that granted the different communities access to specific investigation tools. In the biological field the highest challenge presented to X-ray crystallography has been linked to the study of proteins and nucleic acids, i.e., macromolecular structures composed of thousands of atoms, often available for the analyses in microscopic crystals of low intrinsic order. To support the development of macromolecular crystallography several complementary techniques had to be devised, such as methods in biochemistry and molecular biology, but also progresses in synchrotron X-ray sources. As the contemporary crystallographic methods allow facing very complex protein structures, in relatively short response times, the interest of corporate research for applied crystallography has grown substantially in the last two decades. In particular, current approaches to drug discovery and optimization rely on rational principles that stem from crystallographic investigations on protein/lead complexes, and on cyclic optimization of their chemical synthesis. Notably, the United Nations declared 2014 the International Year of Crystallography in consideration of the fundamental role played by crystallography for the growth of scientific knowledge.

The centennial of the first X-ray crystal structures

A short account is given of the discoveries of the first crystal structures using X-ray diffraction by William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg, a father and son team working at Leeds University and Cambridge University. Their first publications, separately and together, are highlighted. This is a contribution to the centennial celebrations of these discoveries and looking towards the International Year of Crystallography to be celebrated in 2014 led by the International Union of Crystallography.

International Year of Crystallography, 2014

On 3 July, 2012 the United Nations declared that 2014 will be the International Year of Crystallography (IYCr). This action was initiated by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) work- ing with the Moroccan delegation to the UN who proposed the motion. As the President of IUCr, I invite crystallographers and structural chemists in China to participate actively in the celebrations welcoming this important event.

A Century Plus of X-rays

Copyright: © 2012 Datta T. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. As we approach the last quarter of the celebration of the International Year of Crystallography [1] let me relate some of the excitements and the developments that followed the epochal works conducted in 1912 on both sides of the English Channel. I will conclude with a tip of my Stetson to today’s champions who are keeping the fire brightly lit well into the twenty-first century.