- phenixbb - phenix-online.org

Trends In Initial Crystallization Screening
by Mustafa Koksal 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

Dear members of the crystallography community, I would like to assess the tendency/trend in our community to outsource initial crystallization screening experiments. Here, outsourcing refers to sending your protein/DNA/RNA sample to a service provider, who will set up crystallization experiments, take images of crystallization drops at various time points, make images available to you, and, if you require, send you the plate to retrieve any crystals. To do assessment, I prepared a short-answer questionnaire, which contains 10 questions and should take less than 5 minutes to complete. I especially encourage the new PIs and young researchers to complete the questionnaire. Could you please fill out the questionnaire at the following link? https://tr.surveymonkey.com/r/BVNCPVV In case you are unwilling to click links in e-mails, I also included the questions here. Please reply with answers in private to: mustafakoksal(a)iyte.edu.tr Thank you very much for your contribution. Mustafa Questionnaire: 1. Have you outsourced initial crystallization screening experiments in any of your projects before? Yes No 2. If you did, what format and type of experiment you used (choose all that apply)? 96 well/plate 384 well/plate 1536 well/plate Sitting Drop Hanging Drop Microbatch Other (please specify) 3. If you did, what price did you pay per 96-conditions? 4. If you did not, what prevented you from outsourcing (choose all that apply)? It is costly Shipping a sample is hard Privacy concerns I prefer to do it in my lab I do not think it is advantageous I do not have enough sample Other (please specify) 5. Would you be interested in outsourcing initial crystallization screening experiments in future? Yes No 6. If you are interested, which method would you prefer (choose all that apply)? Sitting Drop Hanging Drop Microbatch Counter Diffusion Other (please specify) 7. If you are interested, up to what price would you be willing to pay per 96-conditions? $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $8 $10 $12 $15 $20 $25 $30 $50 8. If you are interested, what would be your minimum-maximum throughput (# of 96-condition experiments per month)? Note: a 1536-condition experiment is 16 x 96-condition experiments? 1 - 2 2 - 4 4 - 8 8 - 12 12 - 16 16 - 32 32 - 64 32 - 128 More than 128 9. How much sample would you be willing to sacrifice per screening 96-conditions (please specify in micrometers)? 10. Would you consider international shipping of your sample for outsourcing? Do you have any other comments? End of Questions -- Mustafa Koksal Postdoctoral Fellow University of Pennsylvania Department of Chemistry Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories Office: 2090 IAST Office Phone: (215) 898-2227 Mobile Phone: (267) 319-6443 Mail Address: 231 S. 34th St, Philadelphia 19104, USA --

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(no subject)
by Nigel Moriarty 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

Folks Calling for articles and short communications of interest to structural biologists. The deadline for submission in the January 2016 issue is 18 December 2015 (with some leeway if you are still working on the text, especially as it can be polished over the break). The Computational Crystallography Newsletter (CCN) is an electronic newsletter for structural biologists, and is published online every 6 months. Feature articles, meeting announcements and reports can be submitted to me at any time for consideration. Submission of text by email or word-processing files using the CCN templates is requested. Past newsletters and a Microsoft Word template are available at www.phenix-online.org/newsletter. Cheers Nigel --- Nigel W. Moriarty Building 33R0349, Physical Biosciences Division Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Berkeley, CA 94720-8235 Phone : 510-486-5709 Email : NWMoriarty(a)LBL.gov Fax : 510-486-5909 Web : CCI.LBL.gov

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ERRASER Updates
by Caleb Geniesse 05 Nov '15

05 Nov '15

Hi all, My name is Caleb and I am a research programmer in the Das lab who has taken over the maintenance of ERRASER. ERRASER (Enumerative Real-space Refinment ASsisted by Electron-density under Rosetta) is an application for improving RNA crystal structures based on Rosetta and Phenix. While benchmarking the current state of ERRASER, I uncovered some discrepancies in the clash scores and outliers of the resulting models (compared to the original benchmark in Chou FC et al., 2012). Accordingly, I've made some updates to the ERRASER code within Rosetta addressing these issues. *To avoid possible inaccuracies introduced by these bugs,* *all PHENIX-ERRASER users should download/install a weekly build of Rosetta 2015.35 (released Sept. 24, 2015) or later.* For more extensive PHENIX-ERRASER documentation and installation notes, please see: https://www.phenix-online.org/documentation/reference/erraser.html. Please let me know if you have any questions! All the best, Caleb Geniesse

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Berkeley Server Downtime
by Paul Adams 05 Nov '15

05 Nov '15

Dear Colleagues, as part of routine maintenance at our new building there will be a power outage to the Computational Crystallography Initiative server room. As a result several structural biology web services will be offline for a short while. These include: - The Phenix web site (http://phenix-online.org/) - The DIALS West web site (http://dials.lbl.gov/) - The CCI web site (http://cci.lbl.gov/) - The Structural Biology Technology Portal (http://technology.sbkb.org/) The servers will be shutdown at 5pm Pacific time on Friday November 6th. Services should resume by the evening of Sunday November 8th at the latest. During the downtime bug reports and emails requesting help should be queued and received by us once the servers are back online. We greatly appreciate your understanding, and hope that this doesn’t present too much of an inconvenience. Cheers, Paul -- Paul Adams Interim Division Director, Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging, Lawrence Berkeley Lab Division Deputy for Biosciences, Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley Lab Adjunct Professor, Department of Bioengineering, U.C. Berkeley Vice President for Technology, the Joint BioEnergy Institute Laboratory Research Manager, ENIGMA Science Focus Area Building 33, Room 347 Building 80, Room 247 Building 978, Room 4126 Tel: 1-510-486-4225, Fax: 1-510-486-5909 http://cci.lbl.gov/paul Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory 1 Cyclotron Road BLDG 33R0345 Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. Executive Assistant: Louise Benvenue [ LBenvenue(a)lbl.gov ][ 1-510-495-2506 ] --

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Modifying restraints for a single glutamate
by Eric Johnson 05 Nov '15

05 Nov '15

Is it possible to modify the restraints for single glutamic acid residue that forms an ester bond with a heme? Formation of the ester bond should lengthen the C - O bond length. Normal restraints distort the geometry of the covalent adduct. Thanks, Eric Johnson

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Installation problem
by Ricardo Padua 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

Hi all, I have the error below when trying to install Phenix in Centos6 running in a virtual machine (VMware workstation 12) in Win7 Enterprise. I've searched for this error in ccp4bb, phenixbb and google but nothing came out. Can anyone enlighten me? Best ========================================================================== Phenix Installation version: 1.10.1-2155 machine type: intel-linux-2.6-x86_64 OS version: 2.6.32-573.el6.x86_64 destination: /usr/local/phenix-1.10.1-2155 # of processors: 8 ========================================================================= Configuring Phenix components... Traceback (most recent call last): File "./bin/install.py", line 262, in <module> installer(sys.argv[1:]).install() File "/home/rpadua/.local/share/Trash/files/phenix-installer-1.10.1-2155-intel-linux-2.6-x86_64-centos6/lib/libtbx/auto_build/install_distribution.py", line 185, in install self.install_from_binary() File "/home/rpadua/.local/share/Trash/files/phenix-installer-1.10.1-2155-intel-linux-2.6-x86_64-centos6/lib/libtbx/auto_build/install_distribution.py", line 295, in install_from_binary self.reconfigure(log=log) File "/home/rpadua/.local/share/Trash/files/phenix-installer-1.10.1-2155-intel-linux-2.6-x86_64-centos6/lib/libtbx/auto_build/install_distribution.py", line 460, in reconfigure call(args=args, log=log, verbose=self.options.verbose) File "/home/rpadua/.local/share/Trash/files/phenix-installer-1.10.1-2155-intel-linux-2.6-x86_64-centos6/lib/libtbx/auto_build/installer_utils.py", line 81, in call raise RuntimeError("Call to '%s' failed with exit code %d" % (args, rc)) RuntimeError: Call to '/usr/local/phenix-1.10.1-2155/base/bin/python /usr/local/phenix-1.10.1-2155/modules/cctbx_project/libtbx/configure.py --current_working_directory /usr/local/phenix-1.10.1-2155/build --command_version_suffix 1.10.1-2155 phenix phaser solve_resolve labelit' failed with exit code 127 Ricardo

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Formylmethionine
by mohamed noor 01 Nov '15

01 Nov '15

Dear all I am refining my model (1.8 A) where there is an excess density even after fitting the N-terminal Met. From Edman degradation data, the Met is actually an FME. However, only the density in one chain allows me to confidently place FME, and not for the other chain. The first chain also has a good enough density for me to be able to build all the residues in the protein except the last two at the C-terminus. So, do I model FME for both chains? Thanks. Mohamed

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a question on rotamer restraints
by Smith Lee 01 Nov '15

01 Nov '15

Dear All, When I run phenix.real_space_refine, in the rotamer restraints step I meet the following error message: RuntimeError: rotatable bond atoms CG1-CD (as defined by tardy-tree): no match in rotamer-info.tor_ids Will you please let me know how to overcome this error? Best regards. Smith

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CaBLAM validate - alternative output?
by Oliver Clarke 29 Oct '15

29 Oct '15

Hi all, I really like the idea of CaBLAM validate for model validation at low resolution based on the CA and backbone geometry, but the output is a little limiting - either text or kinemage right now. Would it be possible to create an output format that can easily be visualized (and turned into figures) in chimera, pymol or coot? Maybe a modified version of the input pdb with the CA/peptide outlier status mapped to the B-factor and occupancy columns? Cheers, Oliver.

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Restraining/constraining partial occupancy waters
by David Briggs 28 Oct '15

28 Oct '15

Hi PhenixBB. I have a very minor problem with partial occupancy waters moving out of density during refinement I have 2 structures, one apo structure (~1.3Å), one ligand bound (~1.5Å). The ligand binding site contains a Calcium ion. In the apo form there are 2 waters co-ordinating this Calcium. In the ligand bound form, these waters are replaced by oxygen atoms within the ligand. However, the ligand is only at 0.5 Occupancy as part of the ligand lies on a crystallographic two-fold axis. The ligand itself refines well with occupancy fixed at 0.5, and the Bs are sensible. In the 50% of the molecules which don't co-ordinate ligand, two waters must co-ordinate the calcium ion, and in keeping with this, we see that the electron density around these positions is greater than would be expected for the 50% occupancy ligand. So I added 2 0.5 occupancy waters to the model at these positions. However, when I run phenix.refine (refining XYZ, real space, occupancy, and individual Bs (isotropic for the ligand & waters - for the protein I use anisotropic Bs) these two 'ghost waters' move out of the electron density and their Bs increase massively. *My questions are:* Is there any way to restrain these waters to their apo positions? Is this the correct approach? I had initially thought that reference model restraints might be useful here, but if I understand correctly, reference model restraints cannot be applied to waters - Is this correct? If I cannot restrain the waters to the apo positions, would I be justified in fixing (constraining) them? This seems a little extreme and I am loath to do it, but given the isomorphous apo structure, I do have evidence that in the absence of ligand waters do take up these positions. Can anyone help? Cheers, Dave [image: David Briggs on about.me] David Briggs about.me/david_briggs <http://about.me/david_briggs>

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