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Good commentary by a chemist here that should be understandable to non-chemists with some scientific background: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/

Good commentary by a chemist here that should be understandable to non-chemists with some scientific background: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/18/small-molecule-structures-a-new-world http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/10/18/sma... It's interesting that both these new techniques and recent antecedents rely on a lot of computing power as well as new concepts and instruments. Cheap, powerful computing is the so-common-it's-invisible enabler for a lot of analytical techniques.

dan-robertson 8y ago
I’m not sure how cheap this computing is. I suppose maybe it is cheap in comparison to the electron microscope but I would guess that a large computer (but possibly not a supercomputer) would be needed to get some of these results. I guess that’s fine for universities though
- philipkglass 8y ago
  According to the supplementary information in the Jones paper, they processed data using the XDS package. https://strucbio.biologie.uni-konstanz.de/xdswiki/index.php/Main_Page https://strucbio.biologie.uni-konstanz.de/xdswiki/index.php/... Here are some XDS benchmarks: https://bl831.als.lbl.gov/~jamesh/benchmarks/ https://bl831.als.lbl.gov/~jamesh/benchmarks/ It looks like XDS will easily process a data set in well under an hour on any reasonably modern multicore CPU, and within a few minutes on a modern system with 16 or more cores. According to those numbers it looks perfectly usable on a laptop.
  - dan-robertson 8y ago
    Oh wow, thanks for that. I was expecting it to need a lot more work than that.