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X-Ray on the nanogram scale


Knumbnuts

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Did anyone see the remarkable paper in Nature by Inokuma etal, entitled X-Ray analysis on the nanogram to microgram scale using porous complexes; Nature 2013, 495, 461-466 doi:10.1038/nature11990.

Apparently all you have to do is dip your sample in a solution of the porous material, slowly evaporate the solvent and place the solid material in the X-ray diffractometer, you know the one, it's been gathering dust in the corner of the lab. Out pops a single crystal structure showing the guest/host complex in which the guest can clearly be observed.

The authors have also combined this with HPLC methodology.

 

This is an amazing piece of work. I wish it had been around earlier because the effort required to obtain a single crystal suitable for X-ray was sometimes, in fact most of the time, enormous. I think it will change the field of structure determination, particularly that of natural products, beyond imagination, and may even make NMR obsolete (assuming you can afford a diffractometer and a tame crystallographer to work it).

Imagine running your HPLC scale reaction, separating the products and obtaining an (almost) immediate X-ray structure of all the reaction products.

 

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