CrystaLinks - Tutorials


Bragg's Law
explained, and an interactive java applet to play with
Ewald Sphere
Animated explanation of Bragg's Law in reciprocal space.
Hampton Research technical guides
Crystal Growth Techniques
Judging the Quality of Macromolecular Models
A Glossary of Terms from Crystallography, NMR, and Homology Modeling (Gale Rhodes)
Kevin Cowtan's
Book of Fourier or "How to tell a duck from a cat".
Interactive Structure Factor Tutorial teaches about structure factors, phases, symmetry, and the relationship between F's and electron density.
Crystal Symmetry
Wikipedia article with tables
Crystallographic Computing 7
Proceedings from the Macromolecular Crystallography Computing School (August 1996, Bellingham WA)
Crystallographic Topology 101
(Carroll Johnson and Michael Burnett). Describes an application of geometric topology to structural crystallography.
Likelihood: theory and application to structure refinement
Lecture notes from a course taught by Randy Read.
Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE)
On-line tutorial by Shaun Purcell.
Principals of Protein Structure
a "virtual course" offering from Birkbeck College and the Virtual School of Natural Sciences.
Model-fitting and Refinement
Lecture notes from a course taught by Randy Read.
Statistical Descriptors in Crystallography
1995 report from the IUCr
SHELX atomic resolution refinement
Tutorial by Thomas Schneider using 1.1Å triclinic lysozyme as an example.
SHELX twin refinement
Tutorial by Regine Herbst-Irmer
Teaching guide for X-ray diffraction by Thomas Proffen & Reinhard Neder (local mirror)
This is a pictorial guide to crystal structures and their Fourier transforms useful for teaching diffraction physics. The examples of structures and their Fourier transform, presented in this tutorial, have grown from courses on diffraction physics taught at the Departement of Crystallography in München.
Virtual Physics Laboratory
A collection of Java applets illustrating various physical principles
Virus World YouTube Channel
Animations of molecular graphics representations of virus particles
Interactive tutorial on model fitting
requires Swiss-PdbViewer
Synchrotron Radiation
A brief introduction from the SSRL web site
Animated video of how synchrotron radiation is generated
An overview of synchrotron radiation at Argonne National Labs (APS)
Soft X-Rays and Extreme Ultraviolet Radiation (course material from a UC Berkeley course by David Attwood). Chapter 5 contains a nice presentation of wiggler and undulator source characteristics.


Ethan A Merritt / merritt@u.washington.edu / Biomolecular Structure Center at UW