Re: [ccp4bb] Difficult data

2013-04-17 Thread mjvdwoerd
Stephen, Stephen, Although your peptide is smaller than the one I once worked on, here are some thoughts that might be applicable. 1. Check and play with the radius of integration in the molecular replacement. The default is probably not appropriate for your case but the value should be

Re: [ccp4bb] delete subject

2013-03-28 Thread mjvdwoerd
No. :-) When you are a reviewer for structural papers in journals (I do this work sometimes), and when you see an article that has (in this example) Tom's structure in it, but he and/or his mentor is not an author, then you call the editor and tell them you may have a problem. I realize that

Re: [ccp4bb] delete subject

2013-03-27 Thread mjvdwoerd
Earlier today, I thought this and did not write it. It is a slightly different theme on your suggestion: I hear there are now (but have not seen examples of) journals (web sites) where you do exactly what Tom did: you put your data there, which proves that you did the work (first) and you do

Re: [ccp4bb] statistical or systematic? bias or noise?

2013-03-13 Thread mjvdwoerd
I think that in statistics you can build a model that describes (and predicts) the uncertainty. So if you have done similar (!) replicate experiments, from which you can build the model, you can apply it to a single observation and provide a reasonably good guess for the value that you were

Re: [ccp4bb] Protein concentration vs Molecular wt...

2012-07-19 Thread mjvdwoerd
I don't think there is such a rule, but in the old days, when we only had Hampton Screen I and II, the rule was: - Set up screen 1, look at the drops and you should expect some kind of precipitation in 50% of the drops. If much less than that, increase your protein concentration. If much more

Re: [ccp4bb] harvesting in cold room (was: cryo for high salt crystal)

2012-07-16 Thread mjvdwoerd
BTW, a l-o-n-g time ago, I worked on a project with crystals that only grew in the cold room. BUT... we found out that the crystals could in fact be transferred to a regular lab under condition that you warmed them up very slowly. So I would harvest the crystals into capillaries (this was

Re: [ccp4bb] harvesting in cold room (was: cryo for high salt crystal)

2012-07-13 Thread mjvdwoerd
Hi Evette: Technically: The expansion ratio of liquid to gaseous nitrogen is approximately 1:700, that is, 1 liter of liquid becomes 700 liters of gas (at room temperature). When you are in a room that is 3 (~10ft) meters tall, 6 (~18ft) meters wide and 10 (~30ft) meters long and you assume

Re: [ccp4bb] harvesting in cold room (was: cryo for high salt crystal)

2012-07-13 Thread mjvdwoerd
oxygen so they can survive, their eyes may get damaged. Too far removed from CCP4. This cannot happen in the cold room while harvesting crystals. Mark -Original Message- From: Jacob Keller j-kell...@fsm.northwestern.edu To: mjvdwoerd mjvdwo...@netscape.net Cc: CCP4BB CCP4BB

Re: [ccp4bb] getting larger protein crystals

2012-07-04 Thread mjvdwoerd
Rex, \begin{shameless self-advertizing} Once upon a time we did a systematic study how to optimize crystal size. The study was done with knowledge of the protein solubility (which is not normally available, of course) and we showed that you can still do it when you do not have this

Re: [ccp4bb] Off topic about application of detergent on non-membrane protein crystallization

2012-06-15 Thread mjvdwoerd
Hi Donghui, Yes. Crystals for restriction enzyme Bsob I were ugly and did not diffract well without detergent and were beautiful with good diffraction in presence of OBG. You can find it in the publication. We did not find any detergent molecules in the structure. Now, when to try such

Re: [ccp4bb] Are these xtal conditions worth optimizing?

2012-06-08 Thread mjvdwoerd
Hi Christine, I would try to optimize both conditions, provided that you do not have contradicting information (like a diffraction pattern that shows a small lattice - salt). Have you tried an additive screen? Have you tried adding a detergent? My experience is mixed with things of that

Re: [ccp4bb] color for metal ions

2012-05-21 Thread mjvdwoerd
There is a really nice web site that shows how colors are perceived by various color-blind readers. One of the journals I recently published in recommends it for consideration. If you are interested, have a look. The web site is made especially for people who publish scientific articles with

Re: [ccp4bb] Suggestions for solving a structure with 8-10 copies per asymmetric unit

2012-04-30 Thread mjvdwoerd
Provided that you guess the number of copies and your guess is reasonably close, my experience is that Phaser will do the job. But you have to tell it how many copies you expect, or it will never make sense of the data. When I did my structure with 6(?) copies some years ago, I guessed a number

Re: [ccp4bb] Crystal behave funny

2012-04-13 Thread mjvdwoerd
Hi Prem, In addition to other remarks made: - You could dissolve one or more crystals in water and have mass spec done to verify that your crystals are a complex. It takes many crystals (20-30) to make sure on an SDS-PAGE. You will probably need to silver stain the gel to enhance the

Re: [ccp4bb] MAD

2012-01-19 Thread mjvdwoerd
With the starting remark that Wayne is larger than life in my mind, we could call SAD the Teeter Method? I think it has a very nice ring to it and perhaps Wayne would approve. I learned something new today. Until now I thought that of course it is called dispersion. That is because in the

Re: [ccp4bb] linux upgrade preferences for CCP4

2011-12-21 Thread mjvdwoerd
Paul, Wait a while, and then CENTOS 6 (or not wait a while). In my opinion neither of your choices are as stable as CENTOS. The big drawback is that CENTOS does not have the latest gadgets - but gadgets and stability are mutually exclusive, by definition. I have lately been annoyed because I

Re: [ccp4bb] crystallization of synthetic peptides

2011-11-10 Thread mjvdwoerd
Hans, Most natural toxins from snakes, scorpions etc are 50+/-some peptides. And quite a few of those have been studied and crystallized (see pdb for a list). Having worked on one of these structures as a graduate student, I can share my experience: - Purification is harder than you would

Re: [ccp4bb] image compression

2011-11-08 Thread mjvdwoerd
Hmmm, so you would, when collecting large data images, say 4 images, 100MB in size, per second, in the middle of the night, from home, reject seeing compressed images on your data collection software, while the real thing is lingering behind somewhere, to be downloaded and stored later? As

Re: [ccp4bb] Archiving Images for PDB Depositions

2011-11-07 Thread mjvdwoerd
Reluctantly I am going to add my 2 cents to the discussion, with various aspects in one e-mail. - It is easy to overlook that our business is to answer biological/biochemical questions. This is what you (generally) get grants for to do (showing that these questions are of critical importance

Re: [ccp4bb] IUCr committees, depositing images

2011-10-18 Thread mjvdwoerd
Phoebe, Just automate the archiving and come up with a reasonable scheme how to. Ours is that data sets are called: userid_yearmonth_projectid_# Userid is derived from the login into CrystalClear (oops, free advertizing), projectid is set by the PI (so she can remember 10 years from now

Re: [ccp4bb] Neutron data collection

2011-09-21 Thread mjvdwoerd
Rex, There are people more qualified to answer your question 1 than I am, so I am going to politely defer that answer. The answer depends on the unit cell dimensions, detector distance etc, and yes, there are more observations rejected due to overlap than would be the case in monochromatic

Re: [ccp4bb] Aging PEGs

2011-08-24 Thread mjvdwoerd
PEG is a polymer and it can be made by anionic or cationic polymerization. Whichever you use, you go the other way to terminate the reaction at an appropriate time (so you have the molecular weight you want). So when you start with an acid, you terminate with a base and vice versa. If you

Re: [ccp4bb] small lysozyme crystals?

2011-07-26 Thread mjvdwoerd
James, I would have a look at the paper by Judge et al: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1300446/pdf/10465769.pdf Specifically, in this paper you will find that the crystallization behavior of lysozyme changes drastically with pH. At the time the paper wasn't really written to

[ccp4bb] Question about movie making

2011-03-07 Thread mjvdwoerd
All, Pardon the slightly off-topic question. We would like to use Pymol and generate movies with it on a WINDOWS computer. We are very familiar with Pymol and how to make the correct views etc. We write the individual frames out into PNG files. So what is left to do, is to stitch together

Re: [ccp4bb] linux flavors

2011-02-22 Thread mjvdwoerd
Dave, We have used CentOS for years and I am very happy with it. We also use NVIDIA hardware. CentOS does not work out of the box with NVIDIA, but NVIDIA has an installation package for their drivers on their web site that does work out of the box in combination with CentOS. That is, you run

Re: [ccp4bb] Micro-g Crystal Growth and the literature

2010-05-10 Thread mjvdwoerd
Methods for vapor diffusion in microgravity have long existed (and the 'trick' is that you cannot have 'free liquid', as we do in standard vapor diffusion plates, because it does not 'stay'). Having worked at NASA, I have said the same thing: vacuum and cooling should be easy - but alas, they

Re: [ccp4bb] where I have been going wrong in crystallization?

2009-12-21 Thread mjvdwoerd
I was going to comment that I have learned the following: respect does not mean the same thing in all places in the world. Some time back I had a protein here that I thought needed extra respect and I had learned from a Rigaku employee how to do this - I bowed very very deeply in front of the

Re: [ccp4bb] Methylation of macromolecular complexes

2009-11-24 Thread mjvdwoerd
There is a reasonable experiment you can do: Take the unit cell of your (presumed) crystal complex and put the search model into the until cell in a way that seems reasonable (use coot, or your favorite program). Make structure factors (with CCP4 or your favorite program) and throw away the

Re: [ccp4bb] Using SAXS data for phasing at mediocre resolution.

2009-09-14 Thread mjvdwoerd
Hi Francis, There is an older paper that mentions this idea: Tsao et al, Acta Cryst B48 (1992), 75-88. However, when you look at the paper, small-angle scattering data is not the only thing that was used. In particular, if my memory serves me right, the 60-fold averaging applied to the

Re: [ccp4bb] Linux flavour and hard disks

2009-08-24 Thread mjvdwoerd
Hi Claudia, There is an option that has not been mentioned yet and has a very obvious advantage: CentOS. I am mentioning this because it is identical in functionality to Red Hat and therefore it will take the least of your time to move to a new system. We like CentOS because it is derived

Re: [ccp4bb] Computer hardware and OS survey

2009-05-01 Thread mjvdwoerd
Todd, Once upon a time I studied at an institution of higher learning. Its specialty is (and was) the education of and participation in medical sciences (I guess that?could be?an oxymoron, sorry). With that comes the securely keeping and sharing (as needed) of patient data. The institutional

Re: [ccp4bb] images

2009-03-18 Thread mjvdwoerd
There have been excellent examples given for cases in which the original data would have been very valuable for discussion and understanding. However, it has always been my understanding that scientists are required to keep the original data on which their conclusions are based. It is also my

Re: [ccp4bb] long term data backup

2009-03-11 Thread mjvdwoerd
We have a tiered system: a) Personal files. Small and many, change often. Typical: CCP4, coot, CNS and other files. Backed up daily. b) X-ray images. Not so many, but large. Large in total. Never change once established. Backed up every two hours. c) Archive. Mostly X-ray images but also some

Re: [ccp4bb] X-Stream 2000 problem - ICING

2009-01-12 Thread mjvdwoerd
Mark, What bothers me about your message is that you already have talked to Rigaku. Until now we have never been able to create a problem that they could not diagnose and help me solve from remote. In danger of offending ccp4 readers: specialized Rigaku experts are a remarkable source for

Re: [ccp4bb] structure (factor) amplitude

2009-01-12 Thread mjvdwoerd
But Tassos, you and Gerard both should know better (Mark vR already knows, clearly). THAT is not Dutch diplomacy, because it always starts like this: No, no, no, you are completely wrong! Actually, the way I learned about Cicero is better explained with Gaius Julius Ceasar. There is a

Re: [ccp4bb] Crystallographic computing platform recommendations?

2008-11-18 Thread mjvdwoerd
I followed Kay's advice (after deciding that I knew better, of course, but we won't elaborate on that :-) and I am very pleased AND have had no trouble (knock on wood) to get everything working just fine. We make sure we have both 64 bit and 32 bit libraries and so far everything has worked

Re: [ccp4bb] Crystallographic computing platform recommendations?

2008-11-18 Thread mjvdwoerd
I completely agree with Marius. Our (my) constraints are not $500 in price difference, but the fact that I maintain a system for scientific computing AND an X-ray system AND I am expected to be a scientist who publishes and writes grants. Thus, our approach has been to automate and minimize

Re: [ccp4bb] Crystallogrphy today

2008-09-20 Thread mjvdwoerd
I agree with Bill. After a few minutes thinking, in between jobs working in the yard: It depends if you need to understand everything (I guess that's impossible these days) --- are you comfortable with publishing and defending research results that you do not understand? I am not. In quite a

Re: [ccp4bb] Progresss with Stereo 3D under Mac OS X Leopard

2008-09-17 Thread mjvdwoerd
I would agree with this statement, my preference is VERY STRONG. We mostly work on Nucleosome and Nucleosome-nuclear protein complexes. By definition these are low-resolution structures. They are very difficult to interpret, even with stereo and I could not imagine even trying to work on

Re: [ccp4bb] Refinement problem

2008-07-25 Thread mjvdwoerd
Hi Sampath, You are asking many questions at once. Since I am right now trying to solve a very difficult Se-Met structure, here are some ideas: - Do you have an energy scan on your crystal, showing that there is absorbance at the correct wavelength for Se? If yes, you have proof that there

[ccp4bb] Acorn question

2008-07-23 Thread mjvdwoerd
All, In the past couple of days I have been trying to use Acorn (in the CCP4 suite of programs). Consistently it starts up fine and after some small amount of time (5-10 minutes) it has taken up all the physical memory and then it starts to slowly gobble up all the swap space until the only

[ccp4bb] Post-doctoral job opportunity

2008-03-17 Thread mjvdwoerd
All, Below you will find the pertinent information for a job opening at the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute. All information can be found at this site: http://www.hhmi.org/jobs/main?action=jobjob_id=548. If you are interested, please follow the instructions in the advertizement and

Re: [ccp4bb] Codon Optimized Expression

2008-02-02 Thread mjvdwoerd
I have seen procedures in a reputable lab where they do indeed pick multiple colonies and mix them; the people with the most experience claim(ed) that this MUST be done for the particular prep they were doing or else they get very low yields. The concern would be (in my mind) that if the

Re: [ccp4bb] crystallisation robot

2008-01-17 Thread mjvdwoerd
Vaheh, I don't recall precipitation at all, but I do remember that we were prepared to change the crystallization recipes (i.e. adjust the recipes from previous 'large volume' crystallization to make more nuclei). For example, our first tests were with lysozyme (sorry, hardly a

Re: [ccp4bb] crystallisation robot

2008-01-16 Thread mjvdwoerd
Once upon a time I worked in a group that was interested in developing crystallization in microfluidics. This was before the time that Fluidigm existed and we had not heard of crystallization with the aid of microfluidics at the time. We had good reason to try to make a system that was as

Re: [ccp4bb] crystallisation robot

2008-01-16 Thread mjvdwoerd
Once upon a time I worked in a group that was interested in developing crystallization in microfluidics. This was before the time that Fluidigm existed and we had not heard of crystallization with the aid of microfluidics at the time. We had good reason to try to make a system that was as

[ccp4bb] HHMI Post-doc Job opening

2008-01-10 Thread mjvdwoerd
All, I am posting on behalf of Dr. Karolin Luger. Dr. Luger has a job opening for a post-doctoral researcher. Job Summary: Looking for a highly motivated individual with a strong interest in integrated approaches to problems in structural biology. The lab has extensive crystallographic and

Re: [ccp4bb] coot in stereo

2007-08-14 Thread mjvdwoerd
Paul: We are running Coot under Centos with Nvidia video cards, emitters and glasses. Although our system is relatively new and therefore has not been used as extensively as I would like to see, we have never encountered your problem and hopefully will not. There are programs (VMD) in which

Re: [ccp4bb] need help for viewing hardware stereo

2007-07-16 Thread mjvdwoerd
It could be a hardware problem or it could be a mis-configuration. The card you list DOES support stereo viewing in all crystallographic applications, I am sure, because we have the same hardware (except our computers are 64 bit and we run CentOS operating system, but otherwise identical).

Re: [ccp4bb] : Crystallographic Programs on AMD computers

2007-04-12 Thread mjvdwoerd
We have made the change to 64 bit computers and indeed it is a bit confusing to have to think 'twice' (32/64 bits). I guess that the argument can be made that eventually all computers will be 64 (or more) bit and therefore staying with 32 bits on a new computer is like holding back

Re: [ccp4bb] x86-64

2007-02-15 Thread mjvdwoerd
Although I have not yet tried to compile coot or CCP4, I have found that the GNU provided packages (gcc, g77) do not make life convenient (how is that for a euphamism for 'banging your head against the wall)? Things worked better with gfortran than g77 and again better with the Intel

Re: crystal friendly solvents that are useful for dissolving hydrophobic small molecules?

2007-01-22 Thread mjvdwoerd
Toluenes and derivatized benzenes may absorp into your plastic tray? Or into the tape covering your tray? Just few other destinations. It would make sense that if the binding of the 'drug' to the protein is tight, then you do not need much in immediate contact, it will get there. The method