Free Mercury
Crystal Structure Visualization, Exploration and Analysis
Mercury has a comprehensive range of tools for 3D crystal structure visualization and the exploration of crystal packing. It’s firmly established as the visualizer of choice within the crystallographic community.
Mercury is available in two versions:
- The free version through CSD-Community offers an abridged list of functionalities and access to a teaching subset of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD).
- The licensed version (available in all of CCDC’s software suites) provides access to the full CSD – over 1.25 million structures – and extra functionality including molecule and structure editing and the visualization of voids. Learn about the full licence version of Mercury.
- Compare the features available in free and in full Mercury here.
Note: Free Mercury is only for Non-Commercial use. Please contact us for Commercial use.
For even more features try the full version of Mercury.
Benefits
Generate stunning 3D images
Mercury has a vast number of options for customizing display settings and is widely used for the generation of publication-quality images. A Style Manager contains a number of pre-defined display styles for work, publication and presentation and also provides the ability to preserve and share your own custom display settings. Stunning 3D images created using Mercury can be exported in a variety of common formats. In addition, it is possible to render high-quality ray-traced images using POV-Ray.
Easy data load
Mercury is able to load structural data from a variety of formats and provides an extensive array of options to aid the investigation and analysis of crystal structures.
Multiple options to view structures
Generate packing diagrams of any number of unit cells in any direction, define and visualize least-squares and Miller planes, and take a slice through a crystal in any direction. Simulated diffraction patterns can be calculated for any displayed crystal structure.
Gain an understanding of the key interactions that drive crystal packing
Locate and display hydrogen bonds, short non-bonded contacts, and user-specified types of contacts e.g. chlorine...oxygen contacts in the range 2-4Å. Build and explore networks of intermolecular contacts.
Included in
Fields
Use Cases
Free Tutorials – Learn How to Use Mercury
Watch the tutorial for insights, tips, and tricks on how to visualize and analyse structures using Mercury.
Watch nowLearn more
See a complete and up-to-date list of FAQs in our knowledgebase at the link above.
FAQs
Mercury works with most molecular structure and crystal structure files including .mol, .mol2, .cif, .pdb and many more.
See a complete and up-to-date list of file types Mercury supports here.
The free version of Mercury available in CSD-Community is suited for generating basic images of molecular structures in non-commercial research. The full licence version of Mercury can be used in all research and gives more functions like molecule and structure editing, displaying voids and hydrogen-bond graph sets, plotting, charting, and reporting structural data, analysing conformations, bond lengths, valence angles, and ligand-based drug discovery features.
See a detailed comparison of free Mercury vs full licence Mercury for academics here in our free or paid versions.
For commercial users compare the different packages here.
Note: Free Mercury is only for Non-Commercial use. Please contact us for Commercial use.
Yes – providing they are in a supported file format. See a full list of file types Mercury supports here.