3D structures from the CCDC

For me, learning about chirality during my undergraduate chemistry course was a poignant moment. It’s such a bizarre phenomenon. To begin with I felt I was reasonably good at visualising simple enantiomers in my head. But as chemists progress through their degrees they find the molecules they’re studying becoming ever more elaborate and the concepts more difficult to visualise.

One way that makes it easier for students to get to grips with such structures is to see them rendered in 3D on a computer. The Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) has a bewildering array of such structures loaded into it.