The Cambridge Structural Database: a quarter of a million crystal structures

On October 5 2001, the 250,000 crystal structure was archived to the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), marking another milestone in the ever-accelerating growth of the world’s repository of organic and metal-organic crystal structures.

The 250,000^th structure is an organic compound, the product of a photocyclization reaction. It has been assigned the CSD reference code IBEZAQ and was one of two structures published in Angewandte Chemie (Int’l Edition), 2001, 40, 577-579. The paper’s authors are A. G. Griesbeck, W. Kramer, and J. Lex, of the U. of Köln, Germany. 'This is a landmark achievement, not only for the CSD, but also for small-molecule crystallography worldwide,' said F. Allen, Scientific Director of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center (CCDC). The CSD began in 1965 with just a few hundred structures. We expect to reach half a million structures by 2010.

The CSD has subscribers at almost 120 industrial sites and nearly 1000 academic institutions, covering 56 countries worldwide. 'Expansion, maintenance, development, and distribution of the CSD and its associated software continue to be the cornerstones of the CCDC’s activities,' said D. Hartley, CCDC’s Executive Director. 'We are not only determined to maintain the currency of the CSD itself, but also to enhance its permanent value through the development of new scientific applications and software products.' The CCDC and its collaborators also develop CSD-related application programs such as SuperStar and GOLD, for investigating protein-ligand interactions, for protein-ligand docking, and for DASH, a program for Structure solution from powder diffraction data. A parallel database system; Relibase+, is also available for the Analysis of Protein-ligand structures in the Protein Data Bank. For further information, contact: S.J. Maginn, Support and Marketing Manager, CCDC, FAX: 44 1223 336066; maginn@ccdc.cam.ac.uk, www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/.