New opportunities in biological and chemical crystallography

Banerjee [Proc. R. Soc. (1933), 141, 188-193] offered a new way of approaching the crystallographic phase problem which not only broke new ground beyond the `trial and error' structure solution method of that time but also heralded the extremely powerful direct methods of crystallography of the modern era from the 1970s onwards in chemical crystallography. Some 200000 crystal structures are known today. More complex crystal structures such as proteins required new experimental and theoretical methods to solve the phase problem. These are still evolving, and new methods and results involving synchrotron radiation at softer X-ray wavelengths (2 Å) are reported. In addition, an overview is given of the new opportunities that are possible for biological and chemical crystallography, especially via harnessing synchrotron radiation and neutron beams.