X-ray crystallography is an essential tool for understanding the chemical properties of crystals and the three-dimensional structure of molecules, being one of the most widely used techniques by structural biologists.

The Protein Data Bank (PDB) currently holds structures of over 170,000 biological macromolecules, with X-ray crystallography contributing about 90% of the atomic coordinates for these molecules. This allows scientists in the fields of biochemistry and molecular biology to gain an in-depth understanding of macromolecular structures at atomic or near-atomic resolution, revealing the spatial distribution mechanism of atoms within biological processes.