To automate or not to automate: this is the question

New protocols and instrumentation significantly boost the outcome of structural biology, which has resulted in significant growth in the number of deposited Protein Data Bank structures. However, even an enormous increase of the productivity of a single step of the structure determination process may not significantly shorten the time between clone and deposition or publication. For example, in a medium size laboratory equipped with the LabDB and HKL-3000 systems, we show that automation of some (and integration of all) steps of the X-ray structure determination pathway is critical for laboratory productivity. Moreover, we show that the lag period after which the impact of a technology change is observed is longer than expected

A program to analyze the distributions of unmeasured reflections

Crystallographic Fourier maps may contain barely interpretable or non-interpretable regions if these maps are calculated with an incomplete set of diffraction data. Even a small percentage of missing data may be crucial if these data are distributed non-uniformly and form connected regions of reciprocal space. Significant time and effort can be lost trying to interpret poor maps, in improving them by phase refinement or in fighting against artefacts, whilst the problem could in fact be solved by completing the data set. To characterize the distribution of missing reflections, several types of diagrams have been suggested in addition to the usual plots of completeness in resolution shells and cumulative data completeness. A computer program, FOBSCOM, has been developed to analyze the spatial distribution of unmeasured diffraction data, to search for connected regions of unmeasured reflections and to obtain numeric characteristics of these regions. By performing this analysis, the program could help to save time during structure solution for a number of projects. It can also provide information about a possible overestimation of the map quality and model-biased features when calculated values are used to replace unmeasured data

Acta Crystallogr D Biol Crystallogr

In macromolecular X-ray crystallography, diffraction data sets are traditionally characterized by the highest resolution dhigh of the reflections that they contain. This measure is sensitive to individual reflections and does not refer to the eventual data incompleteness and anisotropy; it therefore does not describe the data well. A physically relevant and robust measure that provides a universal way to define the `actual' effective resolution deff of a data set is introduced. This measure is based on the accurate calculation of the minimum distance between two immobile point scatterers resolved as separate peaks in the Fourier map calculated with a given set of reflections. This measure is applicable to any data set, whether complete or incomplete. It also allows characterizion of the anisotropy of diffraction data sets in which deff strongly depends on the direction. Describing mathematical objects, the effective resolution deff characterizes the `geometry' of the set of measured reflections and is irrelevant to the diffraction intensities. At the same time, the diffraction intensities reflect the composition of the structure from physical entities: the atoms. The minimum distance for the atoms typical of a given structure is a measure that is different from and complementary to deff; it is also a characteristic that is complementary to conventional measures of the data-set quality. Following the previously introduced terms, this value is called the optical resolution, dopt. The optical resolution as defined here describes the separation of the atomic images in the `ideal' crystallographic Fourier map that would be calculated if the exact phases were known. The effective and optical resolution, as formally introduced in this work, are of general interest, giving a common `ruler' for all kinds of crystallographic diffraction data sets

The complete structure of the large subunit of the mammalian mitochondrial ribosome

ISSN:0028-0836ISSN:1476-468