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Microcrystal Electron Diffraction (MicroED) for Small‐Molecule Structure Determination
Author(s) -
Kunde Tom,
Schmidt Bernd M.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
angewandte chemie international edition
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 5.831
H-Index - 550
eISSN - 1521-3773
pISSN - 1433-7851
DOI - 10.1002/anie.201813215
Subject(s) - diffraction , electron diffraction , context (archaeology) , molecule , chemistry , electron crystallography , crystallization , crystal (programming language) , materials science , nanotechnology , analyte , crystallography , physics , computer science , optics , organic chemistry , paleontology , biology , programming language
The development of new methods to analyze and determine molecular structures parallels the ability to accelerate synthetic research. For many decades, single‐crystal analysis by X‐ray diffraction (SXRD) has been the definitive tool for structural analysis at the atomic level; the drawback, however, is that a suitable single crystal of the analyte needs to be grown. The recent innovation of the crystalline sponge (CS) method allows the microanalysis of compounds simply soaked in a readily prepared CS crystal, thus circumventing the need to screen crystallization conditions while also using only a trace amount of the sample. In this context, electron diffraction for the structure determination of small molecules is discussed as potentially the next big development in this field.