Mercury (crystallography)

History

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) developed and launched two programs, named ConQuest and Mercury that run under Windows and various types of Unix, including Linux. ConQuest as a search interface to the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), with Fortran code that performs a large variety of tasks, such as two dimensional and three-dimensional substructure searching. Mercury introduced as a crystal structure visualizer having the facilities for exploring the intermolecular contacts. The mercury program entirely written in object oriented C++. The C++ Qt library is used for building the GUI and OpenGL for three-dimensional graphics rendering. The primary objective of the first generation Mercury is to provide the three dimensional viewing of crystal structures with .MOL2, .PDB, .CIF, .MOL file formats. The first version have approximately 2800 users signed on to the Mercury e-mail announcement list. Mercury 2.0 launched in 2008, with additional tools to interpret and compare packing trends in crystal structures. Mercury version released in 2015 and later provides an additional functionality to generate 3D print. The current Version 4.0 of Mercury developed its visual interface up to a greater extent by comparing with its old versions.