Re: [ccp4bb] mmCIF as working format?

[Boaz Shaanan]

Boaz Shaanan, Ph.D.                                         Dept. of Life Sciences                                      Ben-Gurion University of the Negev                          Beer-Sheva 84105                                            Israel                                                                                                                  E-mail: bshaa...@bgu.ac.il Phone: 972-8-647-2220  Skype: boaz.shaanan                  Fax:   972-8-647-2992 or 972-8-646-1710                          From: Nat Echols [nathaniel.ech...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, August 05, 2013 10:45 PM To: בעז שאנן Cc: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] mmCIF as working format? On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Boaz Shaanan <bshaa...@bgu.ac.il> wrote: There seems to be some kind of a gap between users and developers as far the eagerness to abandon PDB in favour of mmCIF. I myself fully agree with Jeffrey about the ease of manipulating PDB's during work, particularly when encountering unusual circumstances (and there are many of those, as we all know). And how about non-crystallographers that are using PDB's for visualization and understanding how their proteins work? I teach many such students and it's fairly easy to explain to them where to look in the PDB for particular pieces of information relevant to the structure. I can't imagine how they'll cope with the cryptic mmCIF format. >I think the only gap is between developers and *expert* users - most of the community simply wants tools and formats that work with a >minimum of fiddling.   That assumes that you can offer such software, but can you? I doubt that this goal is reachable (in fact our daily experience proves just that), with all due respect to  you developers. >Again, if users are having to examine the raw PDB records visually to find information, this is a failure of the software. It's not raw, it's easily readable text, very easy to interpret with very little effort.  Anyway, this discussion is a waste of time.  The decision has been taken, mmCIF will prevail and we (expert and non-expert users) have to swallow the pill.  Boaz -Nat