Breakthrough - electron crystallography for everyone

"Rapid structure determination of microcrystalline molecular compounds using electron diffraction", published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition has attracted great attention in the chemistry community. This publication in Angewandte was selected as one out of twelve candidates worldwide by the Science Magazine for the research Breakthrough of the Year 2018 (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/choose-your-2018-breakthrough-year), and made the fifth rank.

T. Gruene, J. Wennmacher and co-authors set up an electron diffractometer that works as efficiently as an X-ray diffractometer, the standard equipment in nearly every chemistry department - just that electron crystallography works on samples million times smaller than X-rays and therefore determines the single structure from crystals smaller than the a single grain of icing suger. The authors present the complex structure of a methylene blue derivative, and the determined the single crystals structure of an API directly from a powder blend. The zeolite ZSM-5 was essential for the "crystallographic calibration", which was key to the efficiency of the instrument.

The work was named a landmark paper and reached the 98th percentile among nearly 150,000 scientific articles.

The media have been very excited about this work, with interviews from Science, Chem & Eng News and reports in Phys. Org..

More references to the paper published in Angewandte appeared in Nature and in ScienceNew.

Every chemistry department in the world uses X-ray diffractometers for daily work. From now on, they can double their output with an electron diffractometer.