In October 2018 Derek Lowe in his blog on Science Translational Medicine (see also https://blogs.sciencemag.org) commented on new findings related to two publications about electron diffraction, among our paper in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. This article generated quite a huge amount of comments, in which we participated, too.
The discussion is about why the new approaches generated such a big hype recently compared to previous related ones. We have a pretty clear view on it. Electron Diffraction of organic molecules is definitely a game changer for many applications in pharma as well as in many other industries.
The experiment runs in the exact way crystal structures are determined using X-rays, but instead we use electrons We call it Electron Diffraction (others call it Electron Crystallography) as it has nothing to do with Microscopy. The only reason why many people are still referring to it as EM is because you use (for the time being) an electron source which is embedded in an Electron Microscope.
The technique is very promising and will increase the amount of possible structures by 6 to 8 fold.
We also have successfully analysed nano-particles from an industrial inorganic sample which was never before fully characterized. We succeeded during this series of experiments. Unfortunately this results won’t be published until a patent is released.
If you are interested in the crystal structure of a nano-crystalline material, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us. We will have soon (in Switzerland) the possibility to offer Electron Diffraction as a service. In that sense, if we can help somehow with any kind of small molecule that needs crystallographic characterization, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us.
