crystallography

New crystallographic method will help pharmacists and faster computers

Swapping your left shoe for the right one while putting them on is unpleasant, but swapping molecules in the same way when making medicines can be fatal - instead of a drug poison is produced. A new method invented by a team of international scientists led by Lukas Palatinus from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences will help prevent this. The unique procedure for determining the position of atoms in crystals was published last week in the Nature Chemistry journal.

Research
Lukáš Palatinus

The revelation of the secret of imperfect crystals as a challenge for Lukáš Palatinus

Crystals are as a construction set. They are made up from tiny building blocks which often are molecules. Lukáš Palatinus is able to determine what molecules look like and how they are put together in a crystal. He can thus create new models of crystal structures. An imperfect crystal, which is characterised by errors and inaccuracies in the cube structure, is another scientific challenge for Lukáš Palatinus.

Research
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Dr. Václav Petříček has received the Barrett Award

Václav Petříček has received the Charles Barrett Award for development of the theory of incommensurately modulated and composite structures, for utilizing this theory in the computing system Jana2006 and for development of an archiving system of aperiodic structures in the database Powder Diffraction FileTM.

Awards
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