Crystallography Open Database

Crystallography Open Database [North American Mirror, modified search interface and JSmol/Jmol displays] Search and view

Several crystallography databases are offered for browsing. You can search the databases, download and display the contained Crystallographic Information Files  (CIFs), view 3D models of the encoded crystal structures and morphologies.

We also provide the North American mirror of the Crystallography Open Database (COD) on a separate server. This is the world’s premier site for crystallographic open access data on small molecules and small to medium unit cell materials. There are more than 450,000 entries in this database and several mirrors active all over the world. At this particular server, another mirror is accessed under our standard search interface and has more (and backwards compatible) Jmol display options.

Please do participate and enjoy the following little anecdote by Sir William Lawrence Bragg:

I said to the proprietor of a shop in Ballater, on Deeside, “That’s a fine group of smoky quartz in your window.” He replied “That’s no smoky quartz, that’s topaz. It’s a crystal. You can tell crystals by the angles between their faces. If you’re interested, I’ll lend you a book on the subject.” On return to base I looked up a book on mineralogy which said ”Smoky quartz, also known as Cairngorm, is called Topaz in Scotland.”

This is from A Random Walk in Science: The high standard of education in Scotland, published by IOP, as quoted in J. R. Helliwell, X-ray crystal structure analysis in Manchester: from W. L. Bragg to the present day, Z. Kristallogr. 217 (2002) 385-389.