Ever heard of blue tomato ketchup? Seen hair-like braids on the nanoscale?

Professor Steed from our Department of Chemistry takes us on a journey through the wonders of polymorphism – multiple types of crystal packing in solids. Polymorphism is now big business in areas such as drugs, agrochemicals and explosives.

Chemists are developing novel crystallization methods to fully explore the ‘solid forms landscape’ of molecular crystals. Professor Steed will show us how polymorphism is a fundamental property of chemical compounds and give at least 1.05 billion financial reasons for the importance of polymorphism in the pharmaceutical industry! We’ll also see some weird things our chemists have seen in their designer gels when looking at polymorph discovery.