CCDC Partnering with Crystal Engineering: A Textbook
During a conversation with Prof. Gautam Desiraju at this year’s Gordon Research Conference on Crystal Engineering we got on to the topic of how students would visualise the crystal structures referenced in the recently published Crystal Engineering: A Textbook. This new textbook, published by IISc Press and World Scientific Publishing, was written by Gautam R. Desiraju, Jagadese J. Vittal and Arunachalam Ramanan to introduce the topic of Crystal Engineering to senior undergraduates and beginning PhD students. The writing in the textbook and the diagrams shown are very clear and understandable, but it is often the case that a good understanding of a crystal structure only really comes with visualisation of that structure in 3D.
To provide the readers of the textbook with as interactive an experience as possible, we agreed to add the structures referenced in the book to our freely available teaching subset and to generate a new webpage specifically for this set. This means that every one of the structures mentioned in the book will be accessible for free on the web using WebCSD and also through the free version of Mercury. The dedicated web page for this collection of 86 CSD entries accompanying Crystal Engineering: A Textbook is shown here.
We’re really hoping that this exciting partnership will help to engage young scientists with the subject of Crystal Engineering – the field is really now becoming established and the challenge is to spread knowledge of it more widely amongst research chemists. After the massive growth in the field over the last 20 years or so, the CCDC is looking forward to the next 20 years when Crystal Engineering will hopefully be providing tailored crystalline products across many branches of chemistry!
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