Peter Wood CCDC

The CCDC team were deeply saddened to hear that Jack Dunitz has passed away at the age of 98. Here we reflect on Jack’s life and work with memories from colleagues and friends.

The CCDC offers a selection of products and services free of charge for the benefit of the scientific community, which includes a free version of Mercury. While the free version supports several functionalities, many popular features are only available with a licence. Here we explain the differences between the free and paid licence versions of Mercury.

Our central suite for data search and visualisation is now called CSD-Core - and we wanted to explain why we've made this change.

Congratulations to Dr Karen Robertson, from Nottingham University, for winning the CCDC Chemical Crystallography Prize for Younger Scientists 2020 (CCDC Prize).

Machine learning is a fast growing area of active research within structural science and it is particularly effective in the crystallographic structural sciences due to the wealth of highly accurate structural data available. A key part of machine learning though is having effective molecular descriptors to represent complex chemical information about molecules and structures into easily machine-interpretable vectors of numbers to feed into machine learning algorithms. 

The way that we use version numbers in our software applications is changing - and this should now be much simpler! This blog explains what's changed, and how you can make sure you have the most up to date version.

Each year we hold User Group Meetings, or UGMs, as a chance to meet with scientists from all areas of industry and academia who are using our software. This quick summary outlines what happens on the day, and why you should attend if you haven't before.

The CCDC Chemical Crystallography Prize for Younger Scientists (or 'CCDC Prize' for short) was created by the CCDC and the Chemical Crystallography Group (CCG) of the British Crystallographic Association (BCA) to both inspire and recognise excellence in crystallographic research coming from early career scientists in the UK. This prize is awarded every year on the basis of original research in the field of chemical crystallography or the application of crystallographic information to structural chemistry, including advances in instrumental, experimental, theoretical or computational techniques within this field.

Using data driven insights to inform the future of the CSD

With the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) reaching a million structures earlier this year, there is now, more than ever, the opportunity to harness the power of this data through effective visualisation, analysis and extraction.

The introduction of the CSD Python API in 2015 has been transformative in structural science research both within the CCDC and across our user community.