[16] SHELXL: High-resolution refinement

SHELXL-93 was originally written as a replacement for the refinement part of the small-molecule program SHELX-76. The program is designed to be easy to use and general for all space groups and uses a conventional structure-factor calculation rather than a fast Fourier transform (FFT) summation. The latter would be faster but in practice involves some small approximations and is not suitable for the treatment of anomalous dispersion or anisotropic thermal motion. The price to pay for the extra precision and generality is that SHELXL is much slower than programs written specifically for macromolecules. This is compensated for, to some extent, by the better convergence properties, reducing the amount of manual intervention required. A new version, SHELXL-97, was released in May 1997; this is the version described in the chapter. The changes are primarily designed to make the program easier to use for macromolecules. Advances in cryogenic techniques, area detectors, and the use of synchrotron radiation enable macromolecular data to be collected to higher resolution than was previously possible. In practice, this tends to complicate the refinement because it is possible to resolve finer details of the structure. It is often necessary to model alternative conformations, and in a few cases, even anisotropic refinement is justified.