Hello guys,

There is too much text in this discussion to respond to every part of it. Apart 
from “jiggle” in certain software like PHENIX and I believe in X-PLOR 
derivatives the word “shake” means the same. In the “MAIN” environment I use 
the word “kick” to randomly distort coordinates. It's first use introduced in 
the early 90’s was to improve the convergence of model refinement and 
minimization. I have seen it as a substitute to molecular dynamics under real 
or reciprocal crystallographic restraints (we call this simulated annealing or 
slow cooling) as it is computationally much faster.  The procedure in MAIN is 
called "fast cooling” because the atoms move only under the energy potential 
energy terms with no kinetics energy present. The “fast cooled” the structure 
is thus frozen - take from a high energy state to the one with the lowest 
potential energy reachable. In order to reach the lowest possible point in 
potential energy landscape the kick at the beginning of each cooling cycle is 
lowered. The initial kick coordinate size is typically from 0.8A and drops down 
each cycle down to 0. The experience shows values beyond 0.8 may not lead to 
recovery of chemically reasonable structure in every part of it. Towards the 
end of refinement the starting kick is typically reduced to 0.05.  Apart from 
coordinates also B-factors can be kicked. 

Are the structures after “kick” cooling refinement the same as without the 
kick? My over two decades long experience shows that by kicking convergence of 
refinement is improved. The resulting structures can thus be different as the 
different repeating cooling cycles may shift them to a lower energy point. 
However, after the structure is refined (has converged), the different 
refinements will converge to approximately the same coordinates as Ian 
described.  I assume the this is the numerical error of the different 
procedures. As to the use of different TEST sets  we came to a different 
conclusion (see bellow).

As to the claim(s) that kicking/jiggling/shaking does or does not  remove the 
model bias the color of the answer is not black and white, but it is grey. 
Kicking namely reduces the model bias, but does not eliminate it.  We have 
shown this in our kick map paper by Praznikar J et al (2009) "Averaged kick 
maps: less noise, more signal... and probably less bias." Acta Crystallogr D 
Biol Crystallogr. 921-31.  

As for the use of % or number of reflection for R-FREE and the TEST, my 
suggestion is not use the TEST set and concept of R-free at all. Namely, 
- excluding the data from the target changes the target, because in refinement 
the information present in every missing reflection can not be recovered from 
the rest of data.  (The Fourier series terms are orthogonal to each other, 
therefore information from each reflection is not present in any other 
reflection.) The absence of certain data thus contains a bias of their absence.
- In addition, in the ML refinement using the cross validation the shape of ML 
function is calculated from the TEST set of structure factors of chemically 
reasonable structure, which is regularized by chemical energy terms and thus 
contains systematic error.  Because of this propagation of this effect on the 
whole model structure under refinement, the cross validation introduces model 
bias in refinement.  
For detailed explanation you are invited to read our paper "Free kick instead 
of cross-validation in maximum-likelihood refinement of macromolecular crystal 
structures”  which just appeared on line in Acta Crys D (2014). 

best regards,
dusan
 

Dr. Dusan Turk, Prof.
Head of Structural Biology Group http://bio.ijs.si/sbl/ 
Head of Centre for Protein  and Structure Production
Centre of excellence for Integrated Approaches in Chemistry and Biology of 
Proteins, Scientific Director
http://www.cipkebip.org/
Professor of Structural Biology at IPS "Jozef Stefan"
e-mail: [email protected]    
phone: +386 1 477 3857       Dept. of Biochem.& Mol.& Struct. Biol.
fax:   +386 1 477 3984       Jozef Stefan Institute
                            Jamova 39, 1 000 Ljubljana,Slovenia
Skype: dusan.turk (voice over internet: www.skype.com

Reply via email to