Contact us
Daresbury campus:
CCP4
STFC Daresbury Laboratory
Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus
Daresbury
Warrington WA4 4AD
UK
Telephone: (+44) 1925 603455 (direct line)
Facsimile: (+44) 1925 603825
e-mail (preferred): ccp4@ccp4.ac.uk
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Harwell campus:
CCP4
Diamond House
Harwell Science and Innovation Campus
Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0DE
UK
Telephone: (+44) 1235 567721 (direct line)
e-mail (preferred): ccp4@ccp4.ac.uk
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Mission Statement
CCP4 exists to produce and support a world-leading, integrated suite of
programs that allows researchers to determine macromolecular structures
by X-ray crystallography, and other biophysical techniques. CCP4 aims to
develop and support the development of cutting edge approaches to
experimental determination and analysis of protein structure, and
integrate these approaches into the suite. CCP4 is a community based
resource that supports the widest possible researcher community,
embracing academic, not for profit, and for profit research. CCP4 aims
to play a key role in the education and training of scientists in
experimental structural biology. It encourages the wide dissemination of
new ideas, techniques and practice.
History and Constitution
The Collaborative Computational Project Number 4 in Protein
Crystallography was set up in 1979 to support collaboration between
researchers working on such software in the UK, and to assemble a
comprehensive collection of software to satisfy the computational
requirements of the relevant UK groups. CCP4 was originally supported
by the UK Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), and is
now supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research
Council (BBSRC). The project is coordinated at
STFC Daresbury Laboratory.
The results of this effort gave rise to the CCP4 program suite, which
is now distributed to academic and commercial users world-wide.
CCP4 is overseen by two committees: Working Group 1 meets annually and makes
general policy. The PIs of all UK protein crystallography groups are invited
to WG1, as well as representatives of the UK-based commercial groups.
Working Group 2 meets more frequently and coordinates the
developers. There is an Executive Committee comprising the Chairmen of
Working Groups 1 and 2, the CCP4 Group Leader and elected individuals from
Working Group 1. The Executive Committee oversees the project on a day-to-day
basis and reports back to Working Group 1. See the
Staff Page for current members of the Executive Committee, and current
developers.
Licensing
There are separate licences for academic and commercial groups, see
Licensing Page.
Referencing CCP4 etc
Any publication arising from use of the CCP4 program
suite should include a reference to the program, see
References and [Collaborative
Computational Project, Number 4, 1994] given as:
COLLABORATIVE COMPUTATIONAL PROJECT, NUMBER 4. 1994. ``The CCP4 Suite: Programs for Protein Crystallography''. Acta Cryst. D50, 760-763.
Such citations are valuable to us in maintaining
funding. In addition, authors of specific programs should be
referenced where applicable - see the program's documentation and/or
output.
Philosophy of the CCP4 suite
Unlike many other packages, particularly for small molecule
crystallography, the CCP4 suite is a set of separate programs which
communicate via standard data files, rather than all operations being
integrated into one huge program. This has some disadvantages in that
it is less easy for programs to make decisions about what operation to
do next - though it is seldom a problem in practice - and that the
programs are less consistent with each other (although much work has
been done to improve this). However the great advantage arising from
such loose organisation is that it is very easy to add new programs or to modify
existing ones without upsetting other parts of the suite. This reflects the
approach successfully taken by Unix. Converting a program to use the
standard CCP4 file formats is generally straightforward, and the
philosophy of the collection has been to be inclusive, so that several
programs may be available to do the same task. The components of the
whole system are thus a collection of programs using a standard
software library to access standard format files (and a set of
examples files and documentation) available for most Unix
operating systems (including Linux), as well as Windows and Mac OS X.
Programs are mostly written in C/C++ and Fortran 77.
To use the programs the user must assign input and output files,
and run the programs. Often an output file
becomes the input to the next step, and system parameter substitution
may be used to create filenames in a systematic way. Most
crystallographic calculations involve a series of steps in which no
decisions need be made until the end, and a command file provides an
easy way of chaining calculations.
Standard file formats are defined for the principal data types used
in crystallography: reflection data; density maps; and atom
coordinates. In defining these formats, a number of trade-offs are
made between efficiency (in space and access time), flexibility,
portability, and simplicity of use.
There is a policy of continual technical and scientific updates to the
suite. Where existing programs have been incorporated into the suite
they have often subsequently undergone considerable modification above
that needed to use the CCP4 file formats.
CCP4 Resources
- Helpdesk
- Bug reports and/or problems running the programs should be sent to
ccp4@dl.ac.uk. We will endeavour to
help where we can (but note that no warranty for the software is given
or implied). But remember that we are not psychic and cannot solve problems
without the necessary information (so send input script, entire log file
and relevant data files).
- Documentation
- Individual program documentation
is available, together with a postScript version of the CCP4
manual with content distinct from the program documentation (about
1.5 MB). The corresponding files are distributed with the suite.
- Problems pages
- If you are having problems with CCP4 programs either compiling or running
then have a look at the Problem
Page. This contains various fixes effected since the latest release.
- Tutorials, examples and test data sets
- A set of tutorials is distributed with the program suite, see the
examples/tutorial subdirectory. There are also a large
number of individual examples, see the examples/unix/runnable
subdirectory. The tutorials and examples use distributed test data.
- Email distribution lists
- The most popular is the Bulletin
Board for general questions on protein crystallography (not
necessarily CCP4-related). We also run a
developers' list, and several other project-based lists.
- Meetings
- CCP4 organises and/or sponsors several meetings a year, see the
Courses page. The most important of
these is the two-day Study Weekend held each year on a
chosen subject, just after the New Year. Back copies of the
proceedings to these meetings are
available.
- Newsletter
- CCP4 publishes an occasional newsletter
and some recent issues are available by
anonymous
ftp. From June 1996, newsletters are available in
html format.
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