This award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities Program will help the Department of Chemistry at Montana State University upgrade its x-ray diffraction laboratory. Major projects supported by acquisition of this equipment will include: Organic Synthesis; Organometallic Transformations of Organic Systems; Preferred Structures of Non-Rigid Molecules; Rare Earth Doped Crystals for Laser Materials; Characterizations of Bioactive Metabolites from Plant Microbes; Polynues; Polynuclear Bridged Mixed Valence Platinum Compounds. Single crystal x-ray crystallography is the most powerful analytical method for structure determination of solids. In synthetic inorganic, organic, bioinorganic and organometallic chemistry, single crystal x-ray diffraction is an invaluable tool to characterize molecular structure. The information gained from the knowledge of the molecular composition and structure helps to develop new reactions of potentially general intereral interest in catalysis or synthesis.
