[log in to unmask] wrote:
> In the end, we're solving all these structures because we believe (or at
> least hope) that they'll be useful for understanding biology. That
> means that biologists should be able to understand what we deposit.
The problem is that we seem to want a format which is intuitive to
novices, directly relevant to biology and yet crystallographically
rigorous and comprehensive.
To my mind this is effectively impossible. Already we have to have
separate 'biological unit' files to overcome the biologically
unintuitive symmetry of our structures.
I think we would be far better separating the requirements for
intuitiveness(?) and rigour. We should have a technical format - like
that we are discussing - to fully describe our model in crystallographic
terms, and a separate interpreted description for the biologist.
Biology students don't necessarily need to know the difference between
restrained adps and the results of TLS, but they do require a consistent
representation so that they can conceptually interpret disorder in a model.
Should we perhaps be working in parallel on a separate standard
representation which is appropriate for biological interpretation, so
that we aren't seduced into muddying the technical requirements of the
PDB/mmcif format?
Good journal articles do this to a large exent:- if there is no article
(and thus a non-peer-reviewed structure), or not enough detail in an
article to assist a biologist in understanding the structure, then
that's a problem we have to solve in other ways.
Cheers,
Charlie
--
Charlie Bond
Professorial Fellow
University of Western Australia
School of Biomedical, Biomolecular and Chemical Sciences
M310
35 Stirling Highway
Crawley WA 6009
Australia
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+61 8 6488 4406
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