Single-crystal X-ray diffraction:

Work on this topic was begun by István Náray-Szabó (an early student of Sir Lawrence Bragg, in the period 1928-1930) in Szeged in 1930. He solved several structures and with a generalization of crystal isomorphism he defined the descriptors of "sister structures" in 1943. After the war, young physicists under the guidance of Kálmán Sasvári started to work on various applications of X-ray diffraction at Eötvös Loránd University. In 1958, a new X-ray laboratory (chaired by Náray-Szabó) in the Central Research Institute of Chemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences started work on inorganic crystals, and from 1962 the work was extended to organic crystals, compounds of biological importance, organosulfur compounds, organosilicon compounds, clathrates and inclusion compounds, etc. From the eighties, study of polymorphism-isostructurality and supramolecular chemistry became the main profile.

The single crystal X-ray diffraction laboratory at the Department of Chemistry, University of Debrecen was established in 1995. The main research areas include the structure determination of small molecules, especially metal complexes of biologically important ligands, water-soluble phosphane ligands and their complexes with platinum group metals, macrocyclic systems, carbohydrate derivatives and other organic molecules. Characterization and comparative analysis of hydrogen-bonded networks in various metal complexes are also performed.

Optical crystal research:

This started in 1928, when Z. Gyulai together with D. Hartly, made the first experiment to detect the existence of crystal imperfections. Gyulai observed that the tensile strength of NaCl whiskers depends on their diameters and can be nearly as high as that theoretically calculated for perfect crystals. He and I. Tarján grew synthetic quartz crystals in the early fifties. Tarján arranged for Hungary to join the IUCr in 1963. He was a co-author of the "Laboratory Manual on Crystal Growth" (1972). The pamphlet "An Introduction to Crystal Physics" was written by E. Hartmann (1984, 1998) for the Teaching Commission of IUCr. The centre of oxide crystal growth and characterization in Hungary is now the Research Institute for Solid-State Physics and Optics.

Protein crystallography:

The traditionally strong Hungarian drug research necessarily resulted in a demand for the establishment here of protein crystallography with the aim of providing well-defined structural models for rational drug design. In 1993, a RIGAKU R-AXIS imaging plate detector with a rotating anode was installed at the Department of Theoretical Chemistry of Eötvös Loránd University, led by the theoretical chemist, Gábor Náray-Szabó. Since then a dozen or so students have been trained in protein crystallography by Zsolt Böcskei and later his student, Veronika Harmat. In the past decade, in co-operation involving Hungarian biochemists, the structures of calmodulin and point mutants of xylose isomerase and serine proteases binding various small-molecule ligands have been determined. The successful elucidation of the structure of prolyl oligopeptidase in Oxford by Vilmos Fülöp started here and was followed by other interesting structures, such as a calcium-bound myosin regulation domain and dUTPase.