Actually, zero spacegroup should be tolerated by the CCP4 library now. We were recently alerted to another problem, caused by non-zero origin in the EM map header. But I think this is different to the problem of the original poster.
It's probably fair to say we haven't tested enough against real EM maps, and perhaps we should. Perhaps the original poster could make their problem maps available?? Cheers Martyn -----Original Message----- From: CCP4 bulletin board on behalf of Christoph Best Sent: Tue 7/13/2010 10:20 PM To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] conversion of cyroEM reconstruction from MRC to CCP4 format Hello, we have found that there are some minor issues in MRC files using in Em that can make them unpalatable to the CCP4 map library. You can easily look at header fields in Python - here is a sample program to quickly check some of the more common problems. from struct import * header=file('your_file_name.map').read(1024) print 'dimensions=',unpack_from('iii',header,0) print 'mode=',unpack_from('i',header,3*4)[0],'should be 0, 1, or 2' print 'space group=',unpack_from('i',header,22*4)[0],'should be 1' print 'magic=',unpack_from('cccc',header,52*4),'should be (\'M\', \'A\', \'P\', \' \')' print 'machine stamp=','%x' % unpack_from('i',header,53*4),' should be 4144 or 4444' print 'nsymbt=',unpack_from('i',header,23*4)[0],' should be 0' The issues we typically encountered were bad space groups (zero), wrong machine stamps (they should be 0x4444 or 0x4144), missing the "magic bytes" that spell "MAP ", or a value of nsymbt that indicates the presence of additional symmetry information following the header, which is then missing. Chimera ignores most of these issues. -Christoph -- | Christoph Best <b...@ebi.ac.uk> http://www.ebi.ac.uk/~best | European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, UK +44-1223-492649