CCP4 Activities and news

The 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Crystallographic Association took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, from the 21st to 26th July, and once again CCP4 was present with a stand in the commercial exhibition - this year manned by Charles Ballard and Peter Briggs, with some assistance from Paul Emsley (developer of Coot).

As on previous occasions, we met a mixture of new and familiar faces whom we were happy to help with various questions about the CCP4 software. The two CCP4-related graphics programs CCP4mg and Coot continued to be of interest to visitors, as well as the automated molecular replacement system "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 - and the ACA organisers for their help.

Any last requests ...? From left to right: Paul Emsley, Peter Briggs and Charles Ballard

This year's European Crystallographic Meeting was held in the exotic location of Marrakech. CCP4/Daresbury was represented by Martyn Winn and Norman Stein. Martyn presented aspects of CCP4 at the pre-conference Advanced Training Workshop, and gave a talk on the molecular replacement pipeline MrBUMP. That talk was in a session on "Advances in crystallographic phasing and refinement" which also included Kevin Cowtan on the latest developments in Buccaneer for automated model building at lower resolutions, and Raj Pannu on the latest in the Leiden suite of programs, in particular Afro for FA calculation. Norman presented a poster on the next generation Truncate program which is scheduled for 6.1. Martyn also chaired a lively session on "Structure validation and quality control" which covered X-ray data quality and complementary experimental techniques as well as more traditional areas of validation.

The conference was rounded off by a spectacular Congress Gala Dinner under canvas. As the picture shows, the coach to the dinner was somewhat unusual.

Martyn, somehow riding his "coach" to dinner

The 9th International Conference on Biology and Synchrotron Radiation (BSR) was held from 13th to 17th August in Manchester, close to Daresbury, and was attended by a number of CCP4 staff and collaborators who presented various posters, including:

• "MrBUMP - An automated framework for doing Molecular Replacement in Macromolecular structure solution" - Ronan Keegan, Martyn Winn, Wendy Yang, & Peter Briggs
• "CCP4 Diffraction Image library" - Francois Remacle & Graeme Winter
• "dbCCP4i: Tracking data in PX Structure Determination Software Pipelines" - Peter Briggs, Wanjuan Yang & Ronan Keegan)

Ronan Keegan and Peter Briggs in the poster session at BSR 2007

Wanjuan Yang

At the end of August the Daresbury CCP4 group said farewell to Wanjuan Yang (known to friends and colleagues as Wendy). Wendy had been part of the Daresbury group since December 2004, and had been working on CCP4's contribution to the BIOXHIT project, specifically the development of the "dbCCP4i" database backend and related tools for CCP4i (see the articles in newsletter 45 and newsletter 46).

After over two and a half years with us, she has now moved on to take up a new post working with genomics databases at the Sanger Centre in Hinxton, Cambridge. Wendy has made a significant contribution to the project during her time with CCP4, and we shall certainly miss working with her in future. We wish her every success in her new job and in her post-CCP4 life.

Maeri Howard

On 14th September Maeri Howard (the CCP4 administrator) gave birth to a baby boy. Maeri is now on maternity leave until May 2008, and in the meantime her various roles - including handling of commercial licensing and organisation of the CCP4 Study Weekend - are being filled by very capable colleagues within the CSE Department at Daresbury Laboratory.

We wish both parents and baby well, and look forward to seeing Maeri back again next May - when she will return to the lab, no doubt for a break from motherly duties!