Collaborative Computational Project No. 4
Software for Macromolecular X-Ray Crystallography

CCP4/APS School in Macromolecular Crystallography: From data collection to structure refinement and beyond



School Details

Purpose of the course and intended audience

The course is intended mainly for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the area of structural biology from all across the globe. In some cases, assistant -professor-level applicants can be accepted as well. The school is not meant as an introductory level course to protein crystallography. It is designed more for applicants with reasonable expertise in crystallography and experience with the CCP4 suite. The purpose of the school is to address specific problems that the applicants face while collecting diffraction data and while solving and refining novel structures. Applicants with crystals for data collection or with already collected data will be given strong consideration, although these are not mandatory requirements.

Several of the leading PX software developers from around the world will present lectures and tutorials on their software and will also be available to help with problems during hands-on sessions of the workshop.

Data Collection Workshop

The classroom course is combined with a data collection workshop at the macromolecular crystallography beamlines 23ID-B and 23ID-D of the General Medicine and Cancer Institute Collaborative Access Team (GM/CA-CAT) at the Advanced Photon Source (APS).

Participants will be encouraged to bring their crystals for data collection. However, the workshop beamtime cannot be used for crystal screening. Only samples with proven diffraction will be accepted.

Some of the leading experts in the field will discuss strategies of data collection. GM/CA-CAT staff will guide participants in beamline usage and will help during data collection.

Current capabilities of the beamlines and other details of GM/CA-CAT can be found at www.gmca.anl.gov

Data Processing and Structure Solution Workshop

The aim of this workshop will be to cover all aspects of the structure solution process in macromolecular crystallography, starting from data processing, through phasing and refinement, and ending with validation and deposition.

The workshop will cover many popular programs used for data processing and structure solution with the software developers available to help throughout the week. Programs covered will include: Mosflm, Scala, HKL2000, Refmac, ArpWarp, PHENIX, Phaser, Coot, SHELXC/D/E, Balbes, Mrbump, Buccaneer and many more.