Blog CSD

What do you do when you don’t know how to install the latest updates of the CSD? Or your software is not ‘responding’? Here we’ll cover the different ways to get help and advice. 

The CCDC offers a selection of products and services free of charge for the benefit of the scientific community, which includes a free version of Mercury. While the free version supports several functionalities, many popular features are only available with a licence. Here we explain the differences between the free and paid licence versions of Mercury.

I’m a Research and Applications Scientist on the Materials Science team at CCDC, and I recently taught a session at the Rigaku School for Practical Crystallography, which ran from June 7–18, 2021. The school focused on practical applications of software, techniques and technologies for crystallography. This blog contains links to my recorded modules as well as a self-assessment quiz you can use to check what you’ve learned.

Welcome to CSD University!

We are thrilled to introduce you to our new collection of on-demand educational resources: CSD University (CSDU) – or actually, to the first module of this collection. In this blog you will learn more about the CSDU idea, format (which includes a completion certificate), and the first module, Visualisation 101.

Here we highlight a paper by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory using the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) to train models to predict the densities of molecules from chemical structure alone. This is part of our series highlighting examples of​​ the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) tools in action by scientists around the world.

I’m a Research and Applications Scientist on the Materials Science team at CCDC. In this short blog and accompanying video, I walk through how to make the most of your CSD-Enterprise licence using the tools in CSD-Materials. In the first half of the video, I focus on the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), highlighting its integrations with other databases and how to best use it for geometric analysis. In the second half of the video, I discuss applications of the CSD-Materials software, demonstrating how the different tools within the suite can help with pharmaceutical risk analysis.

Here we highlight a paper by researchers at Tianjin University using the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) and CSD-Materials to identify coformers to prevent the hydrate conversion of the pesticide pymetrozine (PMZ). This is part of our series highlighting examples of​​ the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) tools in action by scientists around the world.

Are you the campus CSD-Enterprise licence owner? Do you want to know more about how the CSD academic licence works? Then this overview of academic licencing and tools is for you. I’m a user support scientist. In this short blog and accompanying video, I walk through how to activate and use your CSD licence and how to assist individual users with their activations. In the second half, I cover training and support opportunities – including tutorials available within the tools and those available online – to help you advance your institution's structural science.

Despite pandemic-related challenges, in 2020 the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) approved 53 new therapeutics, according to a recent "News & Analysis" article in Nature. That’s an increase over the 48 therapeutics approved in 2019, and it falls just behind 2018’s all-time record of 59. Small molecules make up 38 of 53, and they are expected to constitute many of the highest selling new therapeutics.

Here we highlight a paper using the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) and a novel approach to calculating dynamic disorder to identify the major characteristics of structures representing a low degree of dynamic disorder. This is part of our series highlighting examples of​​ the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) tools in action by scientists around the world.