Ha ha!

On Sat, 1 Apr 2023 at 05:34, James Holton <[email protected]> wrote:

> Anyone who has ever had to lecture a student for writing their unit cell
> lengths to dozens of decimal places is going to love the new PDB
> format.  It is more compact, more realistic, and less misleading to the
> poor, downstream consumers of structural data.
>
> Only a few structures in the PDB are better than 1.0 A, and none come
> even close to 0.1 A.  Nevertheless, the classic PDB file format always
> listed atomic coordinates to three decimal places!  That's implying a
> precision of 0.001 A, which is not supported by the resolution of the
> data.  At long last, this age-old error is being corrected.  From now
> on, coordinates will be listed to the nearest Angstrom only.
>
> An unexpected consequence of this is that R-free of a typical structure
> is going to rise from the current ~20% to well into the 40%s.  This is,
> however, more consistent with high-impact structures published in
> big-named journals using modern, better data collection methods like
> XFELs and CryoEM, so we are going to call this an improvement.  Besides,
> R factors are just cosmetic anyway.
>
> Updated molprobity scores are not yet available while the authors fix
> bugs in their programs.  Right now, they return errors with the new,
> improved coordinates, such as:
> line 272: 57012 Segmentation fault      (core dumped)
>
> So, just as we all must adapt to Python 3 this new standard I'm sure
> will earn us all the thanks of future generations. They will no doubt be
> very grateful that we took these pains to protect them from the dangers
> of too many decimal places.
>
> -James Holton
> MAD Scientist
>
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