National Park College (NPC) math and science faculty Dr. Lava Kadel was the monthly
guest lecturer for the American Chemical Society (ACS) on Friday. Kadel spoke on applications
of X-ray crystallography in chemistry.
In chemical and biochemical labs, new compounds are regularly designed and synthesized,
natural products are isolated and new proteins are discovered. These substances could
have many applications, which makes it important to study their structures. X-ray
crystallography is a very powerful technique for determining the three-dimensional
structure of a molecule at atomic resolution. Although there are other spectroscopic
techniques that can solve the structure of chemical compounds, X-ray crystallography
is unique in the sense that it can help us explain the precise spatial arrangement
of atoms and the lengths of chemical bonds.
Kadel not only lectured about the importance of X-ray crystallography, but he also
gave brief information about growing X-ray quality crystals, mounting crystals on
the diffractometer for data collection, collecting thousands of images and data sets,
integrating collected data and ultimately explaining the structure of the compound.
Although this lecture was primarily about solving the structure of small molecules,
Kadel also mentioned that using crystallography structures of complex biological macromolecules
such as proteins and nucleic acids could also be determined.
