Editorial Issue 2 of 2008
This second issue of 2008 is the Annual Special Issue of the British Crystallographic Association (BCA). The 2007 Annual Conference of the BCA was held in Canterbury at the University of Kent and was its 25th Anniversary of this event. With the permission of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) we reproduce in this issue the Meeting Report written by one of us (JRH) and published in J Appl Cryst. From that meeting we have reviews from Dr Sam Motherwell and Dr Andy Parkin as well as a review by Prof Simon Parsons and his colleagues.
As the BCA 25th Meeting Report describes, the ‘Sam Motherwell Symposium’ was a special satellite meeting of the BCA 25th in honour of Sam's contributions to crystallography in general and the CCDC in particular. Sam first gained international recognition in the 1970s for his PLUTO molecular visualizer computer program. Sam concluded the Symposium with a talk entitled ‘The CSD–400,000 answers … but what are the questions?’ presenting thoughts on as yet unanswered questions such as ‘What will be the crystal structure of compound X under given conditions? How many polymorphs of X are there?’ and so on. We are very pleased that Sam took up our invitation to write a review article for us, thus capturing these career-long insights into these important topics. Sam received from one referee the accolade of ‘I really liked this overview that Sam has produced. I really have no major criticisms to make and I have just suggested some (tracked) changes and highlighted a few rather minor questions.’ The other referee, who had quite a lot of input to make, came back with ‘The author has incorporated all the changes I thought would be needed, and even added a few points that I wasn't expecting.’
The CCDC Prize Presentation Talk, ‘Disorder, similarity and probability: improving our understanding of hydrogen bonding in the solid state’, was given by Dr Andy Parkin of the University of Glasgow. We are very pleased that Andy has also written up his talk as a review article in this issue entitled ‘The applications of the dSNAP cluster analysis software to the analysis of structural geometries extracted from the Cambridge Structural Database.’ As a referee remarked, ‘This well-written review includes a brief “how-to-do-it” guide and a concise summary of relevant theory. The main part of the review surveys applications in a logical progression from the analysis of conformations and metal-ligand geometry to studies of intermolecular interactions and entire crystal structures.’
The third review we present is by Stephen A. Moggach, Simon Parsons and Peter A. Wood, entitled ‘High-Pressure Polymorphism in Amino Acids’. One referee wrote ‘This is a very nicely written review on a topic of great interest to a wide range of crystallographers. The authors place high pressure crystallographic studies in the wider context of the relationship between structure and function, discuss the techniques used in high pressure single crystal and powder X-ray and neutron diffraction. They then go on to describe a number of useful methods for analysing intermolecular interactions in single crystal structures at ambient and high pressure and continue on to describe their studies on a range of amino acids.’ The second referee, from another area of crystallography, i.e., to test the accessibility of the review in another discipline, remarked ‘This article is a well-documented review of high-pressure studies on amino-acids …. [the] introduction, conclusions and information on high-pressure techniques, as well as on the PIXEL method, the Voronoi-Dirichlet analysis and the Hirshfeld technique are interesting and stimulating for all crystallographers, including structural biologists. This review is then quite appropriate for Crystallography Reviews.’ Whilst this review did not feature specifically at the BCA 25th, Simon has presented at various BCA and international conferences such as IUCr Congresses and ECMs so that it seemed fitting to include it in this BCA 25th celebration issue of Crystallography Reviews.
We hope you enjoy these three reviews and join with us in offering the BCA the heartiest congratulations on its 25th birthday and its very healthy state of organization and finances.
The Editors always welcome suggestions from potential authors for future reviews.