This is truly astounding stuff. A huge chunk of analytical equipment for chemistry is concerned solely with determining the answers to two questions: what is a monomolecular substance made out of (e.g. elemental composition, chemical bonds, etc.) and what is the 3D atomic structure of this substance. That includes things like mass spectrometers, infrared spectrometers, raman spectrometers, NMR machines, and on and on. Some of these machines cost hundred of thousands or millions of dollars. Much of the rest of the analytical equipment is for separating mixtures of chemicals into separate monomolecular isolates.
These new techniques won't replace all of that equipment, but they will probably become just as common. X-ray crystallography is one of those things that is not as routine as all of the stuff above. Undergraduate chemistry students use GC-MS, and IR or NMR spectrometers, they do not generally do x-ray crystallography. Because it's a ton of work and the equipment is expensive. But if these techniques work as well as they seem to then we could be seeing a new addition to the list of analytical equipment in the vast majority of chemistry labs, and the addition of a new technique for routine chemical analysis.
And that's pretty astounding when you think about it because if you can take some sample that falls out of a chromatography column and then run it through the equipment listed above and this new process which provides atomic structures with small crystalline samples then you can learn basically all you need to know about a chemical within a few hours of "easy" work. That means Joe Blow amateur chemical lab can churn through tons and tons of samples and pump out structures of them like it was nothing. That means you can have a small footprint of lab equipment that you send to Mars or Ceres or the surface of a comet or what-have-you and you can investigate collected samples in situ to a degree that would have required returning them to Earth before.
It's very difficult to overstate just how transformative this innovation is going to be if it pans out at anything close to its apparent promise.
These new techniques won't replace all of that equipment, but they will probably become just as common. X-ray crystallography is one of those things that is not as routine as all of the stuff above. Undergraduate chemistry students use GC-MS, and IR or NMR spectrometers, they do not generally do x-ray crystallography. Because it's a ton of work and the equipment is expensive. But if these techniques work as well as they seem to then we could be seeing a new addition to the list of analytical equipment in the vast majority of chemistry labs, and the addition of a new technique for routine chemical analysis.
And that's pretty astounding when you think about it because if you can take some sample that falls out of a chromatography column and then run it through the equipment listed above and this new process which provides atomic structures with small crystalline samples then you can learn basically all you need to know about a chemical within a few hours of "easy" work. That means Joe Blow amateur chemical lab can churn through tons and tons of samples and pump out structures of them like it was nothing. That means you can have a small footprint of lab equipment that you send to Mars or Ceres or the surface of a comet or what-have-you and you can investigate collected samples in situ to a degree that would have required returning them to Earth before.
It's very difficult to overstate just how transformative this innovation is going to be if it pans out at anything close to its apparent promise.