Over on our eScience pages, Aileen Day has blogged about linking 2D structures in ChemSpider to the corresponding experimental 3D structures in the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).
As well as these links, you can go also go directly from Royal Society of Chemistry journal articles to corresponding entries in the CSD. These links now resolve to a brand new interface over at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), where anyone can immediately see interactive 3D visualisations of structures along with chemical interpretations.
The best example of this is probably a recent structure of vanillic acid and theophylline (see the image below), a flavoursome combination, as a form of vanillic acid gives, yes, you guessed it, the flavour of vanilla, whereas theophylline is found in cocoa beans. This happens to be the 750,000th entry added to the CSD! It’s a structure reported in a CrystEngComm article by Ayesha Jacobs and Francoise Amombo Noa from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa.
This new web interface is great news for our readers, as it provides a much richer user experience for viewing CSD structures after clicking on links within Royal Society of Chemistry journal articles. You can also download the structures, along with all of the available experimental data. You can do this from all of the platforms that you use to read Royal Society of Chemistry articles, including your mobile devices. And it’s up to the minute – as soon as crystal structures are published in a Royal Society of Chemistry journal, the corresponding entries are made available through an automated feed from us to the CCDC. Give it a try!
