Chemical crystallography: from inception to maturity

The use of single crystal X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of a chemical compound has been historically classified as ‘Chemical Crystallography’. The methodologies, the accuracy in experiments coupled with the modern computer gadgets and advances in technology makes this branch of science an unequivocal provider of accurate and precise measurements of molecular dimensions. Structure determination by powder diffraction, crystal engineering, charge density analysis and studies on molecules in excited states are the recent add-ons. T N Guru Row is at the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is a chemical crystallographer and prominent areas of his research are in polymorphism and drug design, charge density analysis andab initio powder diffraction.