This issue of Crystallography Reviews opens Volume 17 with a substantial review and with seven book reviews.
The author of the review is Dr Graeme Day, University Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge; and it is on current approaches to predicting molecular organic crystal structures. Sir John Maddox, former Editor of the international journal Nature, once presented a challenge (in 1988) to the crystal structure prediction (CSP) community, and indeed to crystallographers in general, that prediction of crystal structures was not yet happening; and he saw this as a scandalous situation for modern day research. Dr Day presents a thorough review of this whole field, and this is now enjoying success in, for example, predicting likely polymorphs in drug discovery research. Ideally, one should be able to start with just the structural formula of a molecule and conditions of crystallization, and then, with the aid of clever computation, commonly following the approach of minimizing the global lattice energy, to predict the likely crystal structure. He describes here the various computational methods available and he gives several examples of both rigid and flexible organic molecules, supported by almost 200 references to the scientific literature.
The book reviews are as follows:
Carbohydrate Chemistry and Biochemistry by Michael Sinnott is reviewed by three colleagues at the University of Bath, UK: Ian Greig, Grant Buchanan and Ian Williams.
Methods in Molecular Biophysics: Structure, Dynamics and Function by Igor Serdyuk, Nathan Zaccai and Joseph Zaccai is reviewed by Jacqueline Gulbis (Parkville, Australia).
The two volumes of Instabilities and Self-organization in Materials (1: Fundamentals of Nanoscience and 2: Applications in Materials Design and Nanotechnology) by Nasr Ghoniem and Daniel Walgraef are reviewed by Igor Kudryavtsev (Moscow).
Biomolecular Crystallography: Principles, Practice and Application to Structural Biology by Bernard Rupp is reviewed by J. Mitchell Guss (Sydney, Australia).
Time, Space, Stars and Man: The Story of the Big Bang by Michael Woolfson is reviewed by John R. Helliwell (Manchester, UK).
Two-dimensional X-ray Diffraction by Bob B. He is reviewed by Bob Cernik (Manchester, UK).
Women and Science in India: A Reader edited by Neelam Kumar is reviewed by Monika Mukherjee (Kolkata, India).
As usual, the Editors welcome suggestions from our readers on the crystallographic topics which they would like to see published in Crystallography Reviews.