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Crystallography
School for Practical Crystallography

Rigaku School for Practical Crystallography

We will be holding a Rigaku School for Practical Crystallography on basic topics in crystallography from January 26 - February 6, 2026 beginning at 6 AM GMT and running for up to 90 minutes each day. (Use this Time Zone converter to determine your local time.)

The majority of the time will be spent on small molecule crystallography. This is a great opportunity for people interested in crystallography to gain a basic foundation of single crystal analysis from a practical point of view.

We hope that you both enjoy and gain something from this School and look forward to meeting you, virtually.

We encourage all members of the School to register on our forum (https://www.rigakuxrayforum.com), where we have set up a special area for discussion specifically for this Crystallography School. It is not only a place to ask questions and learn more, but also to introduce yourselves to fellow students.

Rigaku Oxford Diffraction Forum

The Rigaku Oxford Diffraction Forum is where you will find course resources. Use the forum to:

  • Ask questions
  • Meet other attendees
  • Watch recordings

Existing forum members: email RigakuSchool@Rigaku.com to gain access the dedicated area for school attendees.

Non-members: please register yourself at www.rigakuxrayforum.com. In the instruments field enter “Rigaku School” to indicate you are a member of the school. You will not receive a notification when you have been approved, so please try periodically. Please only email RigakuSchool@Rigaku.com if you have issues registering.

Online examination

An Online Examination will be available AFTER the course at https://exam.rigaku.com?qid=26

  • Once started you must answer all 50 questions in 90 minutes or less
  • The exam will be available from Monday, February 9 at 0000 GMT until Friday, Feb 13 at 23.59 GMT
  • You will be allowed a second attempt if you fail the first time.

Certificates

Certificates of Attendance will be provided for those who attend ALL 10 lectures. We can track who has attended or not, so make sure to use your own email address to view the lectures.

A Certificate of Achievement will also be provided for those achieving a mark of 70% or more on the examination.

Both of these will be available via the exam portal https://exam.rigaku.com AFTER Monday, Feb  2 at 0000 GMT. 

Literature for general crystallography

  • Crystal Structure Determination: W. Massa, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2004.
  • Crystal Structure Refinement: A Crystallographer's Guide to SHELXL: P. Müller, R. Herbst-Irmer, A. L. Spek, T. R. Schneider, M. R. Sawaya, Oxford University Press, 2006.
  • Crystals, X-rays and Proteins: Comprehensive Protein Crystallography, by D. Sherwood and J. Cooper, Oxford University Press, 2011.
  • Fundamentals of Crystallography, 2nd Ed., C. Giacovazzo ed. Oxford University Press, © 2002.
  • Understanding Single Crystal X-ray Crystallography, D. Bennett, Wiley-VCH, 2010.
  • Online Dictionary of Crystallography

Literature for finalization

  • The Analytical Calculation of Absorption in Multifaceted Crystals: R. C. Clark, J. S. Reid, Acta Cryst. 1995, A51, 887-897.
  • An Empirical Correction for Absorption Anisotropy: R. H. Blessing, Acta Cryst. 1995, A51, 33-38.
  • Outlier Treatment in Data Merging: R. H. Blessing, J. Appl. Cryst. 1997, 30, 421-426.
  • Ein Beweis des Fixpunktsatzes für n-dimensionale Simplexe: B. Knaster, C. Kuratowski, S. Mazurkiewicz, Fund. Math. 1929, 14, 132-137.
  • KKM Technique and its Applications: Z. Shi-sheng, M. Yi-hai, Appl. Math. Mech. Engl. Ed. 1993, 14, 11-20.
  • Radiation damage in macromolecular crystallography: what is it and why should we care?: E. F. Garman, Acta Cryst. 2010, D66, 339-351.
  • Radiation damage in small-molecule crystallography: fact not fiction: J. Christensen, P. N. Horton, C. S. Bury, J. L. Dickerson, H. Taberman, E. F. Garman, S. J. Coles, IUCrJ 2019, 6, 703-713.

Electron diffraction literature