* 2000 - Janos Hajdu, Richard Neutze, and colleagues calculated that they could use Sayre’s ideas from the 1950s, to implement a ‘diffraction before destruction’ concept, using an X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL).
* 2001 - Harry F. Noller’s group published the 5.5-Å structure of the complete Thermus thermophilus 70S ribosome. This structure revealed that the major functional regions of the ribosome were based on RNA, establishing the primordial role of RNA in translation.
* 2001 - Roger Kornberg’s group published the 2.8-Å structure of Saccharomyces cerevisiae RNA polymerase. The structure allowed both transcription initiation and elongation mechanisms to be deduced. Simultaneously, this group reported the structure of free RNA polymerase II, which contributed towards the eventual visualisation of the interaction between DNA, RNA, and the ribosome.
* 2007 - Two X-ray crystal structures of a GPCR, the human β2 adrenergic receptor, were published. Because many drugs elicit their biological effect(s) by binding to a GPCR, the structures of these and other GPCRs may be used to develop efficacious drugs with few side effects.
* 2009 - Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."
* 2009 - Judith Howard and her collaborators created the Olex2 crystallographic software package.
* 2011 - Gustaaf Van Tendeloo led a team including Sandra Van Aert, Kees Joost Batenburg et. al. determined the 3D atomic positions of a silver nanoparticle using electron tomography.
* 2011 - Dan Shechtman received the Nobel Prize in chemistry "for the discovery of quasicrystals."
* 2011 - Henry N. Chapman, John C. H. Spence and 86 co-workers used femtosecond pulses from a Free-electron laser (XFEL) to examine the structure of nanocrystals of Photosystem I. By using very brief x-ray pulses, most radiation damage is mitigated using the technique called serial femtosecond crystallography.
* 2012 - Jianwei Miao and his co-workers applied the coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) method to pioneer Atomic Electron Tomography (AET), enabling the first determination of 3D atomic structures without assuming crystallinity or averaging.
* 2013 - Tamir Gonen and his co-workers demonstrated microcrystal electron diffraction (microED) for lysozyme microcrystals at the Janelia Farm Research Campus.
* 2014 - The International Union of Crystallography named 2014 the International Year of Crystallography to commemorate the century of discovery since the invention of X-ray diffraction.
* 2017 - Lukas Palatinus and co-workers used dynamical structure refinement to resolve hydrogen atom positions in nanocrystals using electron diffraction.
* 2017 - Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution."
* 2019 - The Cambridge Structural Database reached the milestone of one million structures.
* 2021 - Kenneth G. Libbrecht published the book Snow Crystals: A Case Study in Spontaneous Structure Formation, summarizing his decade-spanning work on the subject for engineering conditions for designer ice crystals.