David Watkin was presented with his ACA Fankuchen Award at the ACA 2011 meeting. He gave a plenary lecture entitled “X-ray Crystallography. Is the Gold Standard becoming Tarnished?”
May 202011
May 122011
CRYSTALS v14.23c installer is available to download for the Windows platfom.
[Update – patched version 1423c released 27 May, fixes format problem with tiny weights in FCF, CIF input bug]
Selected highlights:
- Added bond colouring to indicate either element type, or disordered part
- Improved robustness of weighting scheme 17 (Shelx weights)
- Output observation weights in FCF CIF
- Allow omission of Friedel pairs of reflections from Absolute Configuration plots.
- Fixed crash on ‘Select All’ atoms for large structures.
- Fixed Hide/Show H button on toolbar.
May 012011
Presented by:Â Matthew Tatton & Paul Winship
Research Leader:Â Prof. Timothy J. Donohoe
Published:Â Â Angewandte Chemie International Edition
This is the final isolated intermediate in the synthesis of Neodysiherbaine A; crystals were very small, so data were collected on I19 at Diamond. The natural product is an excitatory amino acid isolated from the Dysidea herbacea Micronesian sponge by Sakai et al.  Biological studies have shown that (–)-neodysiherbaine A is a potent convulsant and is a highly selective agonist for KA and AMPA glutamate receptors. (–)-neodysiherbaine A was a target as part of a research programme to develop new catalytic methods for the formation of heterocycles. Our retrosynthesis of this led to the disconnection of the central THF ring back to a hydroxyl alkene as a precursor for our recently developed Lewis acid catalysed oxidative cyclisation.
Structure of the Month - May 2010