Blog Database Group

This month marks 10 years since the CCDC began formally accepting experimental structure factor data alongside crystallographic information files (CIFs) for deposition of structures to the CSD. The change came about following the lead and advice of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr), whose journals have long required authors to provide structure factor data for published crystal structures. Structure factors, as well as other experimental information, are important as they can be used to describe the distribution of electron density in the structure and enable users to further validate a structural model. This also helps make your data more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). 

For this CSD Educators blog, our guest is Christine Zardecki, from the RCSB PDB. This year, the Protein Data Bank (PDB) is celebrating their 50th anniversary and we are delighted to share with you a bit about their journey in education and the building of the PDB-101 educational resources.

For this CSD Educators blog, I have the pleasure to introduce to you Prof. Alessia Bacchi, from the University of Parma in Italy. In this blog, Alessia will talk to us about her recent experience teaching "virtually" the use of Mercury and the CSD in high schools, with the goal to help students and teachers with the learning and teaching of three-dimensional concepts, such as the geometry of molecules.

It is my pleasure to welcome Dr Natalia Alvarez as our guest for this CSD Educators blog. This is actually a welcome back, as Natalia was a guest editor for the CCDC in 2016, talking about the OpenLab in Uruguay. In this blog instead, Natalia will talk to us about her journey in crystallography, how she first met the CSD (spoiler: it was not love at first sight!), her contribution in regional crystallography schools with insights on how to teach the use of crystallographic databases, in particular the CSD.

Our collection of educational resources has been growing throughout 2020, welcoming new How to videos (on our YouTube and LabTube channels), new self-guided workshops and updates to our existing material. We also added a feedback survey for you to fill in at the end of each workshop to let us know how we are doing and how we can improve.

This month we include in our collections 2 new resources, both about Full Interaction Maps (FIMs, for short): an educational video and a self-guided workshop. With now 2 videos and 3 workshops on the topic, it seems the right time to write a blog about Full Interaction Maps and walking you through the available material: from learning about FIMs, to the first steps to use it, to exploiting its potential in your research.

It is my pleasure to welcome Professor Michael Zdilla from Temple University as our guest for the third blog of the CSD Educators series. In his journey through crystallography teaching, Mike has created the Database for Educational Crystallographic Online Resources (DECOR), which we now host here at the CCDC. In its creator’s words, “DECOR is the world’s first online repository of shared teaching materials for crystallographic education. The site has an array of downloadable visual aids, animations, homework problems, and links to online courses and software downloads. DECOR is a resource for anyone in search of teaching tools for development of a new course for crystallography, augmentation of existing courses, or the pursuit of an informal education in crystallography and diffraction.”

Highlights and insights about our home-friendly activities for kids, towards the discovery of the wonders of crystals.

Reflections on the IYPT in Crystals project - including the competition winners, educational resources you can use at home, and what's next for the fantastic entries collected from across the community.

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