The Chemical drug-able space is very large but new technologies like DNA encoded libraries are sampling a bigger fraction of it. However, we still need to learn how to navigate the DEL chemical space to get the best out of it.

The high throughput crystallography facility at Diamond (XChem) can be combined with screening of crude reaction mixtures to rapidly identify how to improve the affinity of compounds (fragments and hits) binding to a protein to provide new chemical tools or start points for drug discovery.

Three-dimensional covariance-map imaging is a new technique with the potential for determining structures of gas-phase molecules on timescales fast enough to track chemical changes and record ‘molecular movies’ of chemical reactions.