Sweet crystallography – the crystal structure of sucrose

Crystallography365

What does it look like?

What is it?

What’s within that sugar cube floating in your coffee?  There a number of forms of sugars, but the one that sits as a white powder in our cupboards is sucrose.   The sucrose molecule itself is a combination of a glucose and fructose molecule (you can see that each of the molecule have two parts to them).   This means it has a very specific way of packing together to form a solid.   Each sucrose molecule is made of carbon (brown), oxygen (red) and hydrogen (pink).

Where did the structure come from?

Given how important sucrose is to our diets, and how much money is made from sugar, finding its crystal structure was very important question of early crystallography.  One of the challenges to finding its structure was the fact that it is composed entirely of ‘light elements’ only carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.  The…

View original post 69 more words