Welcome to the IUCr's webinar programme

Our free-to-attend webinars from authors, editors and industry experts alike will position you in the very heart of the community, and further live question-and-answer sessions will put you directly in touch with experts where you'll be able to share their best practice to benefit your research.

Our webinar series will begin later in 2016 with an event from Professor Naomi Chayen of Imperial College, London, UK. Naomi will look at how the use of certain smart materials can improve the likelihood and quality of crystallising proteins.

The major problems in this area are usually the lack of crystals, low-quality crystals or, more frustratingly, large crystals that do not diffract at all. The webinar will present some practical solutions to these problems, and it will show some of the ideas and inspiration behind them and the rationale for conducting the experiments in the first place. Importantly, the event will present some valuable examples of successful results that may help attendees improve their skills in crystallising proteins.

The webinar will end with a fascinating look into how innovative research tools such as those discussed during the presentation can be developed into commercial products and, in this particular case, are now being sold to users and/or licensed to commercial entities.

Our second webinar, which will take place two to three weeks after Naomi's, will present a new theory for X-ray diffraction and will be presented by the former Head of Research at PANalytical, Paul F. Fewster.

The webinar will describe the concept behind a new theory for X-ray diffraction [Fewster (2014). Acta Cryst. A70, 257-282; doi: 10.1107/S205327331400117X] and its impact on the interpretation and collection of data. This presentation will use diagrams to explain how the intensity in a diffraction pattern is built and how intensity exists at the Bragg angle when the Bragg condition is not satisfied. This leads to a more complete diffraction pattern from a single crystal and polycrystalline powders than presently assumed. This theory has an impact on measuring the structure factors used in molecular structure determination and will modify the interpretation of the crystal microstructure. The webinar will be of interest to all crystallographers and those interested in structure determination.

New webinars will be launched at regular intervals with the goal of producing a significant body of knowledge, thus allowing attendees a unique insight into leading researchers in the field who are improving techniques, theory and best practice for us all.

Supplementary to this new educational webinar content is a growing volume of video material on our YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/theIUCr), amongst which are many leading names in the field, providing snapshots of their research endeavours and current thinking in their specialist fields.

As an example, recently published is a lecture given by Richard Henderson, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, on the Potential for further improvements in single-particle electron cryomicroscopy, a lecture he gave during the British Biophysical Society meeting (BBS2016) in Liverpool, UK, earlier in 2016 (https://youtu.be/jLxKf-lUGf0). Subsequent presentations within this series will include talks from Sir Tom Blundell on Fighting drug resistance in cancer and infectious disease, Sriram Subramaniam on Cryo-EM has come of age and finally Greg Petsko on New therapeutics for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases using structure-guided approaches.

Visit the IUCr homepage and events pages regularly to keep informed of key dates and activities.