Blog CSD

Last week we were delighted to learn that Dr Olga Kennard had been awarded the twelfth IUCr Ewald Prize for her invaluable pioneering contribution to the development of crystallographic databases, namely the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).

We are pleased to announce the May 2020 data update of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is now available!  This data update brings you 10,188 new structures (10,697 new entries) and increases the total size of the CSD to over 1,048,000 structures (1,067,000 entries).

In recent years, the Njarðarson research group at the University of Arizona have created posters of the top 200 drugs by sales for education, research purposes and scientific communication.¹ When the latest poster based on 2018 data became available for download on their website, I was interested in finding out how many of the top-selling drugs have crystal structures in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).²

At the CCDC we have been deeply saddened by the devastating impact that COVID-19 has had around the world. During these difficult times it has, however, been heart-warming to see the scientific community coming together to try to find a cure and a vaccine.

The CSD - The world’s essential database of crystal structures

After celebrating the huge milestone for structural chemistry with the addition of the millionth structure into the CSD in June 2019, the 2020.0 CSD Release now contains 1,034,174 entries and 1,016,168 unique structures. That means an increase of more than 60,000 entries, and we are well on our way to the next million!

In the year that the CSD hit one million structures, we have been highlighting some of the most prolific contributors to the database. The 7^th person in our CSD Heroes series is P.G.Jones.  Peter is currently 4^th in our annual CSD author statistics!  We we wanted to thank him for his contributions by doing what we do best – searching the CSD! 

Our 6^th CSD Hero is Mike Hursthouse who is currently fifth in our annual CSD author statistics!

In the year that the CSD hit one million structures we are highlighting some of the most prolific contributors to the database. Our 5^th CSD Hero in this series is Alexandra Martha Zoya Slawin who is currently 6^th in our annual CSD author statistics. We wanted to thank Slawin for her contribution by doing what we do best – searching the CSD! 

The CSD - a valuable tool in modern organic synthesis and drug discovery

We always love hearing feedback from users of our tools and services, especially when they share with us how they've used the CSD to advance their research.  So it was great to hear from Prof. Alexander Dömling and Assis. Prof. Constantinos Neochoritis from the University of Crete, who used the CSD and CCDC tools, including ConQuest, Mogul, CSD-CrossMiner and IsoStar, in their recent research. Read their story below... 

Our fourth CSD Hero is Frank Fronczek, currently 7^th in our annual CSD author statistics. 

Frank Fronczek is Director of the X-ray Facility at Louisiana State University and a Fellow of the American Crystallographic Association.  He was a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley after receiving his PhD at Caltech, with Dick Marsh (trained by Linus Pauling) and Bill Schaefer.(1) 

We would like to thank Frank by highlighting some of his key contributions to the CSD.