Fundamentals of Crystallography
By Joseph Cook
e-mail: jc1667@bristol.ac.uk
Information about a crystal can be obtained by bombarding it with electromagnetic radiation or subatomic particles. Crystallographic techniques have been used for many years and have have revealed the structures of important molecules like DNA. This site aims to explain some of the background as to how diffraction can reveal information about crystal structures.
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From left to right: Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins. They won the Nobel prize for Medicine in 1962 for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids, which would have been impossible without Rosalind Franklin's x-ray diffraction studies.