Blog Database Group

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

Today marks a huge milestone in structural chemistry – the sharing of one million organic and metal-organic crystal structures, an achievement of which the entire community should be extremely proud! The creation of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) to share and distribute these structures is truly a team effort. Crystallographers worldwide deposit their data with us and our team of Deposition Coordinators and Scientific Editors here in Cambridge curate and enhance their structures into the database.

Did you know that every year we generate a range of annual statistics based on the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD)?  These allow us to see how the CSD is evolving and provide some insights into the direction small molecule structural chemistry is headed.

Data integrity investigations at the CCDC 

The integrity of the data within the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is of great importance to the CCDC and, no doubt, to the many scientists across the world that use the CSD as part of their research. The CSD is a trusted repository of crystallographic data and as such we are taking a pro-active approach to ensuring the data that we store is both trustworthy and consistent, enabling scientists to find and utilise the best data for their research. Our overall aim is to be able to help depositors, peer reviewers and wider users of the CSD identify the quality and integrity of the data and to ensure, as far as possible, that there are no cases of fraud or plagiarism within the CSD.

In a recent blog - CSD Data Curation - The Human Touch -  we’ve described the work that goes on when new structures are added to the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). However, It’s important to realise that this isn’t the end of the story -  as we get close to adding the one millionth structure to the CSD, it seems like an appropriate time to describe some of the processes we undertake at the CCDC to ensure that the data we make available to scientists continues to empower and inform their research long after it’s initial deposition.