#MinCup25 More reasons to vote for the incredible #calcite and its stunning crystallographic diversity. In Viktor Goldschmidt's monumental "Atlas der Krystallformen" calcite alone gets 153 plates showing different forms and habits. Enjoy them all here, although it may take a while!
https://archive.org/details/atlasderkrystalltaf02gold/page/3/mode/1up

@MineralCup

The Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD) now contains more than 300,000 entries – with about 280,000 unique structures not included in the CSD.

Good news for crystallography: ICSD data is now integrated into CellCheckCSD.
This means:
• Faster checks if a structure is already known
• Avoiding redundant determinations
• One unified search across organic, organometallic & inorganic chemistry

We’re at ECM35 – European Crystallographic Meeting, 25–29 Aug 2025 in Lviv & Poznań !

This year we celebrate 40 years of ICSD with a reception on 28 Aug. Prof. Dr. Wolfram Horstmann will join us – seats are limited, so register at our booth. Don’t miss the latest ICSD updates with Dr. Annett Steudel. See you there!

If you are trying to use LLM for solving atomic structure from XRD, don't!

You are very likely to embarass yourself because you don't understand the basics of crystallography

Getting around to doing some reading about a recent "discovery" which sounds to me like it is actually Crystallography.

#Crystallography

https://youtu.be/M4Wf_JT60rI

#ANSTO is advertising an ongoing position on the MX beamline at the Australian Synchrotron, looking for a chemical crystallographer to join the team.

I've no experience on MX, but in general the beamline scientists at the Aussietron seem to have a good time? Should be a great experience!

https://careers.ansto.gov.au/job/Melbourne-Beamline-Scientist-MX-VIC/1212983066/

Australians only, unfortunately.

"Accelerating Discovery of Ternary Chiral Materials via Large-Scale Random Crystal Structure Prediction"

Authors use an algorithm to create 20 millions potential new materials and go through a bunch of test to check for stability. They end up with 142 compounds...
They proceed to check the potential properties for some of these new materials.

I like that the starting point relies on crystallographically-sensible reasoning and clearly relies on an understanding of the science at play and not just "let throw everything in a big computer".

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04110
#crystallography #MaterialScience

Crystallography & structural biology folks: does anyone still use these? I've been finding stray ones around and now found what looks like an entire case of them. No idea if they are remnants of stuff because the lab was here for a long time or if I should try to find them a home on campus.

maybe @xtaldave or @iris ?

Position for Research Associate (PostDoc) in experimental low temperature #mineralogy and #crystallography at GFZ, Potsdam #Germany #geology

https://www.gfz.de/en/career/job-offers/details

New study uncovers mechanisms behind COVID-19 treatment resistance: a publication highlight from Meharry Medical College Ph.D. candidate KeAndreya Morrison featuring Stefan Sarafianos at Emory University.

Read more here: https://medium.com/sbgrid-community-news/new-study-uncovers-mechanisms-behind-covid-19-treatment-resistance-c34f381623f2

#SBGrid #StructuralBiology #COVID-19 #Crystallography #Antivirals

Building an X-Ray Crystallography Machine https://hackaday.com/2025/07/07/building-an-x-ray-crystallography-machine/ #x-raycrystallography #x-raydiffraction #crystallization #crystallography #HighVoltage #Science #X-Rays #x-ray

Building an X-Ray Crystallography Machine - X-ray crystallography, like mass spectroscopy and nuclear spectroscopy, is an ext... - https://hackaday.com/2025/07/07/building-an-x-ray-crystallography-machine/ #x-raycrystallography #x-raydiffraction #crystallization #crystallography #highvoltage #science #x-rays #x-ray

When you start your Rietveld refinement, you ae going to have a good day!
#crystallography

Kendrew's 1962 #Nobel lecture is a great read for insight into the history of #structuralbiology, including the massive experimental effort to eke out the structure of #myoglobin. This required calculating Fourier transforms of thousands of reflexions, requiring the latest (at the time) #supercomputers like the first EDSAC digital computer and #IBM 7090

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/kendrew-lecture.pdf

The #AFC2026 conference will be a major event for our community of #crystallographers: a great opportunity to get together and exchange ideas on the latest developments in crystallography.
It will also be a chance to (re)discover the city of Lille, its belfries, and its gastronomy.
The AFC conference, will be held in Villeneuve d'Ascq, at Lilliad Learning Center Innovation, from June 30 to July 3, 2026.

While we await the detailed program and the opening of registration, we invite you to save the dates in your calendar!

All information is available on the conference website: https://afc2026.afc.asso.fr
@strucbio @ActaCrystF @afmblab.bsky.social
@cnrs

An interesting use case of LLMs is as a conversational interface to some body of text, as a complement to other forms of navigation: from a table of content or index, via full-text search, or reading specific sections or even the whole text cover-to-cover.

Of course the LLM can still make up nonsense, but this is a similar limitation to a full-text search leading to a section irrelevant to your current question if the search terms match too broadly. With any navigation method, eventually you need to read the material, once you find the section you need.

The Phenix documentation, papers, newsletters and tutorial videos have been fed to an LLM, so now we can navigate it as a conversation: https://phenix-online.org/version_docs/2.0-5725/reference/chatbot.html
A quick test trying to answer a question I knew the answer to suggests that it is working pretty well for sufficiently specific questions. This will likely be useful.

On Thursday June 26th, from 2 to 4 p.m., the next Café Solutions organized by the French Association of Crystallography (#AFC) Young #Crystallographers will be devoted to AutoProc (examples and limits).

For this event, we'll be delighted to welcome Dr William SHEPARD, Beamline Scientist at the Synchrotron Soleil.

English speakers are more than welcome
Here's the zoom link to the Café Solutions: https://u-bordeaux-fr.zoom.us/j/83502635374
@strucbio @ActaCrystF
@afmblab.bsky.social
#crystallography

"UK’s ‘OpenBind’ consortium will use breakthrough experimental technology to generate the world’s largest collection of data [500,000 structures] on how drugs interact with proteins, the building blocks of the body."

Looks like the current diversity & depth of the PDB (i.e. training set) for Alphafold is lacking, and Diamond-II flagship Beamline K04 will have enough throughput to do this.

@strucbio #MacromolecularCrystallography #Crystallography #MX

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-to-become-world-leader-in-drug-discovery-as-technology-secretary-heads-for-london-tech-week

Vegard's law (Mineralogy )

In crystallography, materials science and metallurgy, Vegard's law is an empirical finding resembling the rule of mixtures. In 1921, Lars Vegard discovered that the lattice parameter of a solid solution of two constituents is approximately a weighted mean of the two constituents' lattice parameters at the same temperature: a A ( 1 − x ) B x ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegard's_law