--- title: "Timeline of crystallography" chunk: 4/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_crystallography" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" date_saved: "2026-05-05T16:17:33.515741+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- 1979 - The first award of the Gregori Aminoff Prize for a contribution in the field of crystallography is made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to Paul Peter Ewald. 1979 - A team involving Alfred Y. Cho and others at Bell Labs made the first reconstruction of atomic structures at the materials interface between gallium arsenide and aluminium using X-ray diffraction. 1980 - Jerome Karle and Wayne Hendrickson developed multi-wavelength anomalous dispersion (MAD) a technique to facilitate the determination of the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules via a solution of the phase problem. 1982 - Aaron Klug won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes." 1983 - John R. Helliwell promoted the use of synchrotron radiation in the crystallography of molecular biology. 1983 - Effectively simultaneously Ian Robinson used surface X-ray Diffraction (SXRD) to solve the structure of the gold 2x1 (110) surface, Laurence D. Marks used electron microscopy and Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer used scanning tunneling microscope. 1984 - A team led by Dan Shechtman also involving Ilan Blech, Denis Gratias, and John W. Cahn discovered quasicrystals in a metallic alloy. These structures have no unit cell and no periodic translational order but have long-range bond orientational order, which generates a defined diffraction pattern. 1984 - Aaron Klug and his colleagues provided an advance in determining the structure of protein–nucleic acid complexes when they solved the structure of the 206-kDa nucleosome core particle. 1985 - Jerome Karle shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Herbert A. Hauptman "for their outstanding achievements in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures". Karle developed the theoretical basis for multiple-wavelength anomalous diffraction (MAD). 1985 - Hartmut Michel and his colleagues reported the first high-resolution X-ray crystal structure of an integral membrane protein when they published the structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre. 1985 - Kunio Takanayagi led a team which solved the structure of the 7x7 reconstruction of the silicon (111) surface using Patterson function methods with ultra-high vacuum electron diffraction. This surface structure had defeated many prior attempts. 1986 - Ernst Ruska shared the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope". 1987 - John M. Cowley and Alexander F. Moodie shared the first IUCr Ewald Prize "for their outstanding achievements in electron diffraction and microscopy. They carried out pioneering work on the dynamical scattering of electrons and the direct imaging of crystal structures and structure defects by high-resolution electron microscopy. The physical optics approach used by Cowley and Moodie takes into account many hundreds of scattered beams, and represents a far-reaching extension of the dynamical theory for X-rays, first developed by P.P. Ewald". 1987 - Don Craig Wiley and Jack L. Strominger solved the structure of the soluble portion of a class I MHC molecule known as HLA-A2. This structure revealed the presence of a pocket which holds the antigenic peptide, which is recognized by the receptors of T cells only when firmly bound to the MHC product and presented at the surface of an infected cell. This structure strongly influenced the concept of T cell recognition in future work. 1988 - Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre." 1989 - Gautam R. Desiraju defined crystal engineering as "the understanding of intermolecular interactions in the context of crystal packing and the utilization of such understanding in the design of new solids with desired physical and chemical properties." 1991 - Georg E. Schulz and colleagues reported the structure of a bacterial porin, a membrane protein with a cylindrical shape (a ‘β-barrel'). 1991 - The crystallographic information file (CIF) format was introduced by Sydney R. Hall, Frank H. Allen, and I. David Brown based on the self-defining text archive and retrieval (STAR) file format developed by Sydney R. Hall. 1991 - Sumio Iijima used electron diffraction to determine the structure of carbon nanotubes. 1992 - The International Union of Crystallography changed the IUCr's definition of a crystal to "any solid having an essentially discrete diffraction pattern" thus formally recognizing quasicrystals. 1992 - First release of the CNS software package by Axel T. Brunger. CNS is an extension of X-PLOR released in 1987, and is used for solving structures based on X-ray diffraction or solution NMR data. 1994 - Jan Pieter Abrahams et al. reported the structure of an F1-ATPase which uses the proton-motive force across the inner mitochondrial membrane to facilitate the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). 1994 - Roger Vincent and Paul Midgley invented the precession electron diffraction method for electron crystallography in a transmission electron microscope. 1994 - Bertram Brockhouse and Clifford Shull shared the Nobel Prize in Physics "for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter". Specifically, Brockhouse "for the development of neutron spectroscopy" and Shull "for the development of the neutron diffraction technique." 1994 - Philip Coppens led a team of researchers to uncover the transient structure of sodium nitroprusside, a first example in X-ray excited-state crystallography. 1995 - Douglas L. Dorset published Structural Electron Crystallography, a major text on electron crystallography. 1997 - The Bilbao Crystallographic Server was launched at the University of the Basque Country, led by Mois Ilia Aroyo, Juan Manuel Perez-Mato. 1997 - The X-ray crystal structure of bacteriorhodopsin was the first time the lipidic cubic phase (LCP) was used to facilitate the crystallization of a membrane protein; LCP has since been used to obtain the structures of many unique membrane proteins, including G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). 1997 - Paul D. Boyer and John E. Walker shared one half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for their elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)" Walker determined the crystal structure of ATP synthase, and this structure confirmed a mechanism earlier proposed by Boyer, mainly on the basis of isotopic studies. 1997 - Nobuo Niimura led a team that first used a neutron image plate for structure determination of lysozyme at the Institut Laue–Langevin. 1998 - The structure of tubulin and the location of the taxol-binding site is first determined by Eva Nogales and her team using electron crystallography. 1998 - A group led by Jon Gjønnes combined three-dimensional electron diffraction with precession electron diffraction and direct methods to solve an intermetallic, combining this with dynamical refinements. 1999 - Jianwei Miao, Janos Kirz, David Sayre and co-workers performed the first experiment to extend crystallography to allow structural determination of non-crystalline specimens which has become known as coherent diffraction imaging (CDI), lensless imaging, or computational microscopy. 1999 - A team led by Michael O'Keefe and Omar Yaghi synthesized and determined the structure of MOF-5, the first metal-organic framework (MOF) compound. In the ensuing years, the duo and mathematician Olaf Delgado-Friedrichs further developed the periodic net theory proposed by Alexander F. Wells to characterize MOFs.