Mercury
View, Analyse, and Understand Molecular Structures and Properties
See chemistry in 3D and generate high-definition, customized images, animations, and 3D models of molecules using the crystal structure visualization and analysis software, Mercury.
Chemical and physical properties can be analysed with informatics-based insights drawn from empirical data of the 1.3M+ 3D structures in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).
Researchers use Mercury, in combination with other CCDC data and software, to discover new drugs and molecules, and unlock solid form secrets to develop new materials.
Benefits of Using Mercury in Your Research
Interactive Visualization
Explore your structure your way - follow unit contacts, grow the view in any direction, or examine the unit cell. Customize the display and annotations to show what matters to you.
Comprehensive Range of Visualization Options
Communicate your work effectively to others with clear visuals — choose from pre-build styles, or create your own. Generate high-resolution images of molecular structures for publication, or go further with animations and 3D print files.
Customize to Display Specific Features
Show ellipsoids, polyhedra, packing diagrams, Miller planes, voids, BFDH morphologies and more to illustrate the features important to you.
Display Hydrogen Bond Contacts
Customize the contacts and grow your structure in any specific direction, to explore the solid form and understand its physical properties.
Access Advanced Analysis Tools
Perform your analyses in the Mercury interface, with a host of analytical tools from CSD-Discovery and CSD-Materials built in. (See the full range of tools available for academics in our free or paid versions, and for commercial users in different packages)
Explore Published or Proprietary Structures
Apply all these features to published or new structures — Mercury can open common file formats including .cif .mol .mol2 .pdb .aux and more.
Included in
Fields
Use Cases
Questions from the Computational Chemistry Community
Explore full technical FAQs in our knowledgebase.
FAQs
The free version of Mercury available in CSD-Community is suited for generating basic images of molecular structures in non-commercial research. The full licence version of Mercury can be used in all research and gives more functions like molecule and structure editing, displaying voids and hydrogen-bond graph sets, plotting, charting, and reporting structural data, analysing conformations, bond lengths, valence angles, and ligand-based drug discovery features.
See a detailed comparison of free Mercury vs full licence Mercury for academics here in our free or paid versions, and for commercial users here in different packages.
See the system requirements and supported platforms for Mercury and the CSD software suite here.
Mercury is designed to work with most common crystal structure and 3D molecule files including .mol, .mol2, .pdb, .ent, .cif and more.