Southampton to host new national crystallography service

The facility will include new state-of-the-art laboratory equipment and considerable expertise to enable academics from across the UK to study chemical structures at the scale of electrons, atoms and molecules.

Funding of £3.57m is being provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to deliver the service over the next five years.

Dr Simon Coles, Director of the EPSRC National Crystallography Service, says: “We are delighted that this next-generation facility will be based here at Southampton, serving the academic community of the UK. The new centre will demonstrate best practice in crystallography, developing techniques, software and instrumentation, in addition to handling the most demanding samples that the community needs to investigate.”

Crystallography is concerned with the scattering of beams of X-rays from crystals. Analysis of the scattered rays enables the determination of fundamental chemical structures and the technique can be likened to a ‘microscope’ that can see the arrangement of atoms and molecules. Crystallography is used to determine structures and properties for a wide range of applications such as gas storage materials, catalysts, pharmaceutical drug candidates, sensors, organic electronics, enzymes and proteins.

The new facility, based in the University’s School of Chemistry, will build on the existing national crystallography service. It will have a strong research partnership with Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, which generates intense X-rays known as synchrotron light.

Professor Phil Gale, new Head of the National Crystallography Service and Deputy Head of the School of Chemistry at Southampton, says: “I’m delighted that the EPSRC National Crystallography Service will remain at Southampton for the foreseeable future – it's a credit to the high standards set by the crystallography team here and demonstrates the confidence that the UK crystallographic community has in Southampton.”