In 2001 formed Turkish Crystallographic Association (TCA) presently has about 150 registered members, one fourth of whose are senior scientists. The European Crystallographic Association welcomed the National Crystallographic Association of Turkey at its General Assembly in Cracow in August 2001 as a new member.

TCA has as its prime aims the promotion of crystallography in research and the education of young people and others in the methods, possibilities and achievements of crystallographic science. The other objectives are to organize several scientific activities in order to development the science of crystallography and to form the cooperation between the crystallography and the other sciences in Turkey.

Crystallography is the science that studies the arrangement of atoms and molecules in solids. It is an important part of modern research into the structure and properties of materials ranging across the scientific fields of Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Materials science and Engineering. Crystallographers study diverse substances, from living cells to superconductors, from protein molecules to ceramics. Many crystallographers are used x-rays to investigate the substances, so that the field is generally known “x-ray crystallography”. X-ray crystallography is the primary method for determining the molecular conformations of biological macromolecules, particularly protein and nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA. But in the modern crystallography, neutron diffraction, electron crystallography, molecular modeling, high- and low-temperature studies, high-pressure diffraction and atomic force microscopy are all methods used by crystallographers to elucidate the secrets of structure and function.