Applications of the Cambridge Structural Database in chemical education

Abstract

The Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is a vast and ever growing compendium of accurate three-dimensional structures that has massive chemical diversity across organic and metal-organic compounds. For these reasons, the CSD is finding significant uses in chemical education, and these applications are reviewed. As part of the teaching initiative of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), a teaching subset of more than 500 CSD structures has been created that illustrate key chemical concepts, and a number of teaching modules have been devised that make use of this subset in a teaching environment. All of this material is freely available from the CCDC website, and the subset can be freely viewed and interrogated using WebCSD, an internet application for searching and displaying CSD information content. In some cases, however, the complete CSD System is required for specific educational applications, and some examples of these more extensive teaching modules are also discussed. The educational value of visualizing real three-dimensional structures, and of handling real experimental results, is stressed throughout.

The Cambridge Structural Database

“…Through the CSD community services, educators worldwide are able to access all 800 000 entries in the CSD, but the enormity of the database means it is not a simple process to identify the key structures that are most appropriate for the class. To this end a CSD teaching database (Battle et al, 2010) has been compiled. This is a collection of around 700 carefully selected crystal structures, targeted to represent a diverse range of chemistry and to allow teachers to demonstrate key chemical concepts and principles.…”

Conformational Aspects in the Design of Inhibitors for Serine Hydroxymethyltransferase (SHMT): Biphenyl, Aryl Sulfonamide, and Aryl Sulfone Motifs

“…The gain in Gibbsp rotein-ligand binding energyb ecomes enhanced with increasing degree of preorganizationo ft he ligand;i no ther words, the preferred conformations of bounda nd unboundl igandss hould be similar. [1,9] While the energeticso ft he conformationso ff ree and bound ligand can be evaluated by computational methods, [5,10] conformational preferences of small molecules are best extractedf rom searches in the Cambridge StructuralD atabase (CSD), [11][12][13][14] reaching more than 875 000 entries in 2017. [6,7] Some reports suggest to set the threshold for the bioactive conformation at 3kcal mol À1 of the loweste nergy conformation, [6,8] whereas others give am aximum Gibbs energy differenceo f5kcal mol À1 .…”

Hirshfeld Surfaces and Nonlinear Optics on Two Conformers of a Heterocyclic Chalcone

“…16 The study of crystalline state containing symmetrically independent molecules has a great importance, and it corresponds to a remarkable portion of the known cases. 17 Zorkii and Razumaeva 18 have made a statistical treatment with crystallographic data of 330 crystal structures with more than one molecule in the asymmetric unit, with 20% of these crystals containing independent conformers. Besides that, chemically identical molecules with significant differences on dihedral angles can coexist in a crystal.…”