| "CCP4 Workshop Reports" | CCP4 Newsletter 45 Winter 2007 |
Martyn Winn, Peter Briggs and Charles Ballard
CCP4, CSE Department, CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington WA4 4AD
CCP4 continues to place conferences and workshops high on our list of ways in which to make contact with the international user community. A listing of upcoming events, as well as resources from past workshops, can be found on our Courses page. Here we report on a few of the events from 2006. As well as giving us a chance to share our photographs, we hope it encourages you to visit us at a conference or register for a CCP4 workshop.
The 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association took place in Honolulu, Hawaii at the end of July, and once more CCP4 was present with a stand in the commercial exhibition manned by Ronan Keegan and Peter Briggs.
The stand itself was initially decorated in local Hawaiian style due to a delay in the arrival of our exhibition materials. Once the materials appeared however we were able to revert to a more familiar format, and our giveaways (this year including CCP4 T-shirts) were quickly snapped up. Before: |
and after: 
|
As is always the case at the ACA, we met a mixture of new and familiar faces whom we were happy to help with various questions about the CCP4 software. Of particular interest in 2006 were the two CCP4-related graphics programs CCP4mg and Coot, however there were also many questions about the 6.0 release of the suite and new developments such as MrBUMP.
We'd like to thank all the people who came along and talked to us during the conference and provided us with feedback on the suite - we hope that it was equally interesting and useful for you. We'd also like to thank the ACA organisers for their help, and last but not least Maeri Howard for her behind-the-scenes work in getting everything arranged, printed and shipped.
Hot on the heels of the ACA, the 23rd European Crystallographic Meeting took place in Leuven, Belgium in the first half of August. CCP4 again had a stand, manned at various times by Francois Remacle, Ronan Keegan, Graeme Winter, Wendy Yang and Martyn Winn. Despite being a little hidden, most found us in the end, and we were pleased to meet many new people, as well as old friends.
As at the ACA, demonstrations of Coot and CCP4mg were the most popular items this year, but we were also able to provide advice on a variety of queries, including model building, refinement and installation.
The first dedicated CCP4 workshop to be held in China took place at the Institute of Biophysics, Bejing in October 2006. The five tutors (Eleanor Dodson, Gwyndaf Evans, Roberto Steiner, Martyn Winn and Francois Remacle) gave talks on various aspects of protein crystallography and CCP4, and supervised hands-on sessions in the afternoon. There were around 80 students participating, many of whom had travelled the long distance from Shanghai.
Many of the talks and tutorials are available at http://www.ccp4.ac.uk/courses/china06/. The tutorials were written especially for the workshop, and will be included in the next CCP4 release. As well as going through prepared exercises, many students had on-going crystallography projects, and the tutors were able to provide advice on real problems. Finally, as a side effect of our visit to the IBP, we updated much of the local software to the latest versions.
We'd like to thank our hosts Prof. Tao Jiang, Prof. Zihe Rao and Mark Bartlam, as well as all the participants, for making our stay enjoyable and productive. We hope to be back!
Since the previous CCP4 tutorial in Japan, back in 2000, there have been many advances in the suite. This year, 27 Nov - 1 Dec, CCP4 held a five day workshop at the IPR, Osaka University. The high powered team of Garib Murshudov (York), Phil Evans (LMB-MRC), Kevin Cowtan, Paul Emsley (both York), Serge Cohen (NKI), Raj Pannu (Leiden), Roberto Steiner (Imperial), Nakagawa Atsushi (Osaka), Kosada Takashi (PDBj) and Charles Ballard (Daresbury) covered the range of the structural solution process from data collection to deposition for 70 students, with a mixture of lectures, tutorials and problem solving.
CCP4 would like to extend it's thanks to the local organisation and support team, in particular Fujita-san and Prof. Nakagawa.
In 2006, we started a programme of 1-day university visits, in order to help practising crystallographers get up-to-speed with the latest software, in particular CCP4 6.0. (Those with a long memory may remember a similar series of visits in 2001.) We visited Manchester, Birkbeck, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Nottingham, and plan to make similar visits in 2007. Activities include a health check on local installations, talks on recent additions to CCP4 and 1:1 sessions on specific problems. We are happy to customise visits as appropriate.
