Not your standard protein. orinoco14, CC BY-NC For more than 100 years, scientists have “peered” at atoms in a crystal by analysing the way they scatter X-rays. This process, known as crystallography, reveals the chemical structure of compounds in the crystal and has applications so wide-ranging– from drugs to new materials – that it has become central to how science is done. But almost all of these advances have depended on revealing the chemical structure of unchanging compounds. However, if Makoto Fujita at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues are proved correct, this may all change. For they have developed a method to capture “images” as chemical reactions happen. The difference is in someways as big as that when cameras went from capturing still images to shooting film. Dark magic At this very moment, there are billions of chemical reactions taking place in your body. And yet each of these chemical reaction is special, because for it to occur two or more molecules have come in close contact under the right conditions. These “right conditions” are mostly dependent on the energy available in the system. Without enough energy, the necessary movement of electrons will not occur and the reaction will fail. In nature,
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