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. Again, if users are having to examine the raw PDB records visually to find information, this is a failure of the software. -Nat