The reaction between [Pt(nbe)3] (nbe=norbornene), two equivalents of the phosphines PPh3, PMePh2 or PMe2Ph and 1 equivalent of BCl3 affords the platinum dichloroboryl species [PtCl(BCl2)(PPh3)2], [PtCl(BCl2)(PMePh2)2] and [PtCl(BCl2)(PMe2Ph)2]. All three complexes were characterised by X-ray crystallography and reveal that the boryl group lies trans to the chloride. With PMe3 as the phosphine, ...

The importance of structural biology has been highlighted in the past few years not only as part of drug discovery programs in the pharmaceutical industry but also by structural genomics programs. Mutations of human proteins have been long recognized as the source of severe diseases and a structural knowledge of the consequences of a mutation might open up new approaches of drugs and cure. Alth...

The sequencing of a protein is a complicated issue. Several methods have been developed in order to establish the amino acid sequences of proteins, including Edman degradation, LC/MS/MS and cDNA sequencing. A number of examples confirm that X-ray crystallography could also be a useful tool for the identification of an amino acid sequence of unknown proteins. Here, we present a short review summ...

Structural biology has contributed tremendous knowledge to the understanding of life on the molecular scale. The Protein Data Bank, a depository of this structural knowledge, currently contains over 100,000 protein structures, with the majority stemming from X-ray crystallography. As the name might suggest, crystallography requires crystals. As detectors become more sensitive and X-ray sources ...

C20 of molecular structures for C70Br10 or C60Cl24, which have been later confirmed by X-ray crystallography (partially with the use of synchrotron radiation). For the mixture of two compounds with known X-ray structures, C60Cl28 and C60Cl30, the experimental IR spectra were interpreted by comparison with the calculated ones using subtle differences for compounds possessing very similar structu...

Charged-coupled device (CCD) detectors have been widely accepted as detectors for collecting X-ray diffraction images. The CCD detector offers a sensitive detection system well suited for diffraction analysis and, compared with other detectors on the market, a relatively rapid system for read-out of the collected image. The two predominant markets for the CCD detector have been those in which r...

High-resolution ribosome structures determined by X-ray crystallography have provided important insights into the mechanism of translation. Such studies have thus far relied on large ribosome crystals kept at cryogenic temperatures to reduce radiation damage. Here, the application of serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography (SFX) using an X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) to obtain diffraction d...