Reciprocalspaceship: A Python Library for Crystallographic Data Analysis

A bstract X-ray crystallography is an invaluable technique for studying the atomic structure of macromolecules. Much of crystallography’s success is due to the software packages developed to enable the automated processing of diffraction data. However, the analysis of unconventional diffraction experiments can still pose significant challenges—many existing programs are closed-source, sparsely documented, or are challenging to integrate with modern libraries for scientific computing and machine learning. Here we describe reciprocalspaceship , a Python library for exploring reciprocal space. It provides a tabular representation for reflection data from diffraction experiments that extends the widely-used pandas library with built-in methods for handling space group, unit cell, and symmetry-based operations. As we illustrate, this library facilitates new modes of exploratory data analysis while supporting the prototyping, development, and release of new methods.