Blog Database Group

It is my pleasure to introduce you to our new CSD Champions. They are a network of volunteers who have committed to provide us feedback and guidance to help shape our education and outreach strategy.

Who are our CSD Champions? What is the goal of the initiative? Read further to find out more.

The FAIR Data Principles stand for findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of data for both humans and machines. Here we highlight a few ways CCDC supports the FAIR Data Principles.

We are pleased to announce the September 2021 data update of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is now available!  This data update brings you 16,688 new organic and metal-organic experimentally determined structures (17,283 new entries) and increases the total size of the CSD to over 1,129,000 structures (1,152,000 entries).

How many groups took part in the first challenge of the 7th CSP Blind Test? What kind of experimental work goes on behind the scenes? Read on for answers, and an interesting Q&A with a team from Catalent. Catalent is a development and manufacturing partner that has provided the high-quality experimental data for this test of crystal structure prediction (CSP) methods.

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.”