Crystallography News British Crystallographic Association Issue No. 148 March 2019 ISSI 1467-2790 Successful BCA Group and Pan-African meetings Spring Meeting programme p6 AGM agenda p8 Group Meeting reports p9 Pan-African Conference report p16 SpringerBriefs announcement p17 PHOTON III – Mixed Mode Detection We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Albert Einstein PHOTON III – Best performance for your application needs The PHOTON III detector series benefits from mixed-mode detection, seamlessly combining photon counting and integration modes, to dramatically improve the data quality: No parallax smearing for superior data Photon counting with zero read noise and zero dark current for the ultimate in sensitivity Strong reflections accurately integrated with no count rate saturation Largest home-lab detector for efficient data acquisition Zero dead time, shutterless and continuous data collection for the fastest experiments www.bruker.com/photon3 Crystallography Innovation with Integrity HOT TOPICS IN CONTEMPORARY CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 4 – Structural Biology Mlini, Dubrovnik, Croatia, Oct. 1 – 6, 2019 HTCC workshops – What is it all about? The HTCC workshops tackle most fascinating achievements in both experimental methods and theoretical approaches, which lately put forward structural research to the front lines of natural sciences. We bring together leading experts in chosen domains as lecturers, and utterly ambitious scientists in crystallography or related fields as “students”, who may come from both academia and industry, are keen to acquire new knowledge on the cutting edge methods in structural sciences and explore options to apply them to their ongoing research, or simply desire to find a glimmer of inspiration for their future projects based on the latest developments in structural research. HTCC4 – Structural biology HTCC4 will entirely be dedicated to structural biology. Over four intense working days, we shall cover techniques which go beyond classical crystallography, yet which complement it so smoothly: XFEL – X-ray free electron laser (HT1), cryo electron microscopy (HT2), NMR in macromolecular structural research (HT3) and biomolecular in-silico simulations (HT4). The lecturers and tutors shall explain fundamentals of these methodologies, give examples on their practical applications, tutor the practical and interactive sessions, and moderate round table discussions on how to apply these methods to your own research. The examples of particular systems studied with the presented methods shall emphasize intertwist between the four chosen hot topics in contemporary research. The complementarity of each of the hot topics with classical crystallography shall be discussed. Crystallography News March 2019 Contents From the President. 2 BCA Council 2019. 3 From the Editor. 4 BCA Administrative Office, 4 Dragon Road Harrogate HG1 5DF Puzzle Corner. 5 Tel: +44 (0)1423 529 333 e-mail: [email protected] BCA Spring Meeting 2019, 15th-18th April, University of Nottingham. 6 CRYSTALLOGRAPHY NEWS is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by the British Crystallographic AGM Agenda. 8 Association, and printed by Bowmans, Leeds. Text should preferably be sent electronically as MSword documents (any version - .docx, .doc, .rtf or .txt files) or BSG / CCG / IG / PCG-SCMP Group else on a PC disk. Diagrams and figures Meetings 2018. 9 are most welcome, but please send them separately from text as .jpg, .gif, .tif, or .bmp files. Items may include technical articles, news about people (eg awards, The Second Pan-African Conference (PCCr2). 16 honours, retirements etc), reports on past meetings of interest to crystallographers, notices of future meetings, historical reminiscences, letters to the editor, book, SpringerBriefs in Crystallography. 17 hardware or software reviews. Please ensure that items for inclusion in the June 2019 issue are sent to the Editor Meetings of Interest. 18 to arrive before 25 April 2019. Editor, Carl Schwalbe School of Life & Health Sciences Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET e-mail: [email protected] Deputy Editor, Dave Allan e-mail: [email protected] The British Crystallographic Association is a Registered Charity (#284718) As required by the DATA PROTECTION ACT, the BCA is notifying members that we store your contact information on a computer database to simplify our administration. These details are not divulged to any others without your permission. You may inspect your entry during the Annual Meeting, or otherwise by application to the BCA Administrative Office. We will be This month’s cover: happy to amend entries at any time. Scenes from the BSG, CCG, PCG, IG (clockwise, Printed by North Wolds Printers 83 Halifax Way, Pocklington Industrial Estate, Pocklington, York, YO42 1NR externally) and Pan-African Tel: 01759 303944 Web: www.northwolds.co.uk meetings Crystallography News March 2019 1 From the President IN October I went to an interesting 50/50 mixture of tetrahedral products, a racemate, which is reunion lunch at University College no longer enantiomerically pure. This is a key difference in London. It was the 50th anniversary reaction outcomes, which is of especial interest in medicinal of the arrival in 1968 of about and natural product chemistry where molecules need the seventy fresh-faced new correct chiral centres. Clearly you would expect SN2 reactions undergraduates, of which I was to be the most useful for these applications, with chiral one, to register for a chemistry centres retained, albeit always inverted with respect to the degree. About a third of us turned starting material. Why am I telling you all this? My memories up to reminisce. The chemistry of learning the SN1 and SN2 reactions were also roused by a course was destined to be the root paper by Wendlandt, Vangal and Jacobsen in Nature in 2018. of my lifelong love of crystallography. The new Chemistry They report a catalyst allowing an SN1 reaction to produce building was not quite finished when we arrived, so we one enantiomeric product over the other. The catalyst is, had some lectures in the old building, now known as the necessarily, enantiomeric. Moreover, even a racemic mixture Lonsdale Building, in honour of Kathleen Lonsdale. She of the starting material will produce one enantiomeric product, was one of the first two women elected to the Royal the reverse of what we usually understand by SN1 reactions. Society in 1945, along with Marjorie Stephenson, and a An SN2 reaction would need to be fed a single enantiomer major force in crystallography and social activism, while reagent to produce and enantiomerically pure product, and finding time to bring up three children. She joined Bragg’s then only the one related to the product by inversion. In the research group at UCL and, amongst other achievements, new SN1 reaction, the enantiomer is controlled by the showed that the benzene ring is flat and hexagonal. The catalyst, not the starting material. This is an important step undergraduate practical that infatuated me with forward for asymmetric synthesis. crystallography allowed us to determine the structure of hexamethylenetetramine, another of Lonsdale’s crystal Members will have been saddened to learn of the death of structures. The head of department when I was a student Aaron Klug on 20th November 2018. Aaron was an Honorary was the inorganic chemist Ronald Nyholm, who defined Member of the BCA and a towering figure in structural studies. education as “a process in which a person receives a His major scientific achievements are too numerous to list here, training for a full life in a rapidly changing modern society, but he is probably best known for developing the mathematics carried out in such a manner as will ensure the maximum and methodology for three-dimensional reconstruction of development of the individual personality”. Times have biological assemblies, particularly viruses, from multiple views changed, and it is a shame that universities have taken in the electron microscope. He suggested at the time increasingly been encouraged to operate as businesses that the techniques could be developed for three-dimensional rather than educational institutions. Ron’s signature medical X-rays, but this was apparently treated with scepticism phrase for us was “education through chemistry not by the physics community at the time. His suggestion was education for chemistry” and he made a real effort to vindicated later by the invention of the CAT scanner, which we achieve this. One of my fellow students recalled that he now take for granted as a routine method in hospitals around had once been told “the best training for life is a PhD in the world. He also worked on crystal structures of viruses, X-ray crystallography”, so there you have it. applying symmetry averaging to improve the maps as well as nucleic acids and their protein complexes. Perhaps less well All this reminded me of my 1st year organic chemistry known was his publication in Acta Crystallographica in 1958 lectures, and being taught the basics of nucleophilic of a comprehensive derivation of the mathematics underlying substitution reactions, generally divided into SN1 and SN2. I the joint probability distributions of structure factors and the apologise to readers who have not done an organic chemistry phase problem, which went beyond the derivations routinely module, but many will have and it is not too hard to used in direct methods, and another on the theory of helical understand. Imagine a tetrahedral carbon atom bonded to diffraction. His PhD thesis was on the kinetics of phase changes four different substituents, it will be chiral, i.e. there will be two in solids. He won numerous awards and honours, including enantiomers that are related by mirror symmetry. There are the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1982), and was President of two broad classes of reaction that allow one substituent to be the Royal Society (1995-2000). Despite these heights of replaced by another. In an SN2 reaction, a new substituent achievement, he remained mild-mannered and approachable. approaches one side of the tetrahedron and forms a bond He will be sorely missed.