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Establishing electron diffraction in chemical crystallography

Nature Reviews Chemistry volume 5, pages 660–668 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

The emerging field of 3D electron diffraction (3D ED) opens new opportunities for structure determination from sub-micrometre-sized crystals. Although the foundations of this technology emerged earlier, the past decade has seen developments in cryo-electron microscopy and (X-ray) crystallography that particularly enable the widespread use of 3D ED. This Perspective describes to chemists and chemical crystallographers just how similar electron and X-ray diffraction are and discusses their complementary aspects. We wish to establish 3D ED in the broader chemistry community, such that electron crystallography becomes a common part of the analytical chemistry toolkit. With a suitable instrument at their disposal, every skilled crystallographer can quickly learn to perform structure determinations using 3D ED.

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Fig. 1: Isosurface maps derived from X-ray diffraction and electron diffraction data.
Fig. 2: Theoretical scattering factors for X-ray, electron and neutron diffraction experiments.
Fig. 3: X-ray and electron diffraction involve crystals of different sizes.
Fig. 4: Three common methods exist to prepare electron diffraction samples from dry powders.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Inorganic Chemistry, Faculty of Chemistry, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Tim Gruene & Bernhard Keppler

  2. Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

    Julian J. Holstein & Guido H. Clever

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T.G. and J.J.H. drafted the manuscript. All authors contributed to the final version.

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We dedicate this manuscript to Prof. Christian Robl on the occasion of his 65th birthday

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Gruene, T., Holstein, J.J., Clever, G.H. et al. Establishing electron diffraction in chemical crystallography. Nat Rev Chem 5, 660–668 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41570-021-00302-4

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