SBGrid Newsletter: January 2025

Dear Consortium Members and Affiliates,

 

New Year's greetings to all, with our first newsletter of 2025, and best wishes all around as we weather the storm that January has brought. We're grateful, as always, for this community, and for the opportunity to work alongside all of you who are dedicated to pushing science forward. With that, our update includes the latest from our software webinar series, a software push with twelve updates and eight new titles, six new members to welcome, and two publication highlights from our graduate student desk. 

 

Join us February 11th for the latest from our software webinar series and hear from João Rodrigues, Principal Scientist at Schrödinger, Inc. on Phenix/OPLS and GlideEM: Enabling cryoEM structures for drug discovery with the Schrodinger Suite. If you missed our January webinar on MemBrian V2, you can now watch Lorenz Lamm's presentation on our YouTube channel.

 

To receive email reminders about upcoming webinars, please be sure to register for the series! Registration here: https://sbgrid.org/webinars/#register

Upcoming SBGrid Webinars

Feb 11: João Rodrigues - Phenix/OPLS and GlideEM:  Enabling cryoEM structures for drug discovery with the Schrodinger Suite

Mar 11: Genki Terashi - Structure modeling and Validation using AI-based methods: DeepMainmast and DAQ

Apr 8: Dimitry Tegunov - Warp

May 13: Ellen Zhong - DRGN-AI

Webinar registration and details

SBGrid webinars are hosted with partial support from the NIH R25 Continuing Education for Structural Biology Mentors #GM151273, in collaboration with Co-PI Jamaine Davis of Meharry Medical College.

This month's software push includes updates to Boltz-1, CCP4, ChimeraX, cryoDRGN, LipIDens, ProteinMPNN, PyMOL, Python, R, Topaz, Schrodinger, and Warp, along with eight new titles: BindCraft, Chai-1, Doppio, GTalign,  OpenNucleome, napari-tomoslice, PDBImages, and TEMPy-ReFF. See Software Changes below for complete details.

 

Six new members joined in January: Jeff Cohen of Naional Institutes of Health, Laurel Kinman from University of California, San Francisco, Sukyeong Lee from Baylor College of Medicine, Miguel Leung of Hubrecht Institute, Hening Lin from University of Chicago, and Tobias Madl from Medical University of Graz. Welcome to our newest members!

Member Publication Highlights

From our graduate student desk

Over 100 new member publications appeared in journals this month. You can find a complete listing on our website, along with a couple of notable highlights below:

 

- Caltech doctoral student Vida Storm Robertson highlighted an article that appeared in Protein Science from Eric Ortlund of Emory University School of Medicine, in which the authors examine the mechanism of LBP-3, a lipid binding protein that has been associated with longevity. [Learn more]

 

- Meharry Medical College Ph.D. canddidate KeAndreya Morrison's highlight features a publication in Science Advances from the laboratory of Leslie Vosshall and colleagues of The Rockefeller University, who report on how mosquitoes compensate for loss of smell by enhancing their heat sensitivity, highlighting potential new strategies for disrupting disease transmission. [Learn more]

 

Deposit your experimental datasets

If you're currently preparing a manuscript, please remember that, while you're making the PDB record deposit and publication submission, you can also preserve your primary experimental datasets with deposits to the SBGrid Data Bank https://data.sbgrid.org/.

Cite SBGrid

SBGrid operations are funded with member fees and grants, so we are grateful when you are able to acknowledge SBGrid in your presentations and publications.

 

You can use this SBGrid logo on the acknowledgements slide of your presentations.

 

We also recommend the following boilerplate language for inclusion in publications that report results obtained with SBGrid-supported software:

Structural biology applications used in this project were compiled and configured by SBGrid [1].

[1] A. Morin, B. Eisenbraun, J. Key, P. C. Sanschagrin, M. A. Timony, M. Ottaviano, and P. Sliz, “Collaboration gets the most out of software.,” Elife, vol. 2, p. e01456, Sep. 2013.

Link to article: https://elifesciences.org/articles/01456.

SBGrid Acknowledgements

SBGrid's eLife paper received four new citations since our last reporting, from these SBGrid members: 

 

Dhirendra Simanshu from the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in Nature Communications: Structural insights into isoform-specific RAS-PI3Kα interactions and the role of RAS in PI3Kα activation; John Tainer from the The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in The EMBO Journal: NADH-bound AIF activates the mitochondrial CHCHD4/MIA40 chaperone by a substrate-mimicry mechanism; Daryl Klein from Yale University School of Medicine in Nature Communications: Structural basis for the interaction between the Drosophila RTK Sevenless (dROS1) and the GPCR BOSS; and Goran Bajic from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Aaron Schmidt from Mass General Brigham in Science Immunology: Human naïve B cells recognize prepandemic influenza virus hemagglutinins.

Software Changes

BindCraft is new to SBGrid at version 1.2.0  BindCraft is a simple binder design pipeline using AlphaFold2 backpropagation, MPNN, and PyRosetta. Select your target, let the script do the rest of the work, and finish once you have enough designs to order.

 

Boltz-1 0.3.2 includes a small number of bug fixes.

 

CCP4 releases 9.0.004 and 9.0.005 were pushed out. 9.0.004 includes updates to many CCP4 applications including simbad, servalcat, and DIALS, as well as updates to the ccp4i and ccp4i2 GUIs. 9.0.005 includes updates for DIALS, xia2, and others. See https://www.ccp4.ac.uk/ccp4-8-0-updates/ for more info.

 

Chai-1 is another new title at version 0.5.2. Chai-1 is a multi-modal foundation model for molecular structure prediction and enables unified prediction of proteins, small molecules, DNA, RNA, glycosylations, and more.

 

ChimeraX 1.9 for macOS and Linux includes several new features. Session views are automatically saved, the sequence Region Browser now has a Details column for UniProt feature annotation, and most tools are now prohibited from docking into the top or bottom of the main window, in an effort to prevent the mayhem that results from accidentally docking a tool into the toolbar area. See https://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/trac/ChimeraX/wiki/ChangeLog for more information.

 

cryoDRGN 3.4.3 introduces a new utility for making volume movies using model analysis results, along with some fixes and improvements to existing features.

 

Doppio is also new to SBGrid. Doppio is a web-based user interface for CCP-EM and RELION software. Release 1.1.0 includes numerous enhancements and bug fixes, including support for RELION 5’s Topaz, ModelAngelo, and class ranker by default. 

 

GTalign 0.16.0-alpha is another new one. GTalign is a high-performance (HPC) protein structure alignment, superposition and search method (with flexible structure clustering ability). Both CPU and GPU versions are available with the ability to use multiple GPUs. 

 

LipIDens 1.0 is a rebuild of the existing version 1.0. The new source fixes bugs in some download URLs.

 

napari-tomoslice is also new, at version 0.1.1. napari-tomoslice is a plugin for napari to aid in tomogram visualization and annotation.

 

OpenNucleome 1.3.0 is another new title. OpenNucleome is an open-source software designed for conducting molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the human nucleus. It streamlines the process of setting up whole nucleus simulations through just a few lines of Python scripting and offers high-resolution structural and dynamic chromosome arrangements at a 100 KB resolution.

 

PDBImages 2.5.0 -- also new. PDBImages is a command-line tool from PDBe EMBL-EBI for generating images of macromolecular structures from mmCIF or binary CIF structure files based on Mol*.

 

ProteinMPNN 20250113 includes the new soluble model weights.

 

PyMOL 3.1.3 is now available and includes an update to python 3.10 and support for Schrodinger’s new license format. BCIF and GZSDF file support was also added. Additional changes can be found here: https://github.com/schrodinger/pymol-open-source/blob/master/ChangeLog

 

Python releases 3.6.0 and 3.6.15 were added for backwards compatibility with some user workflows. 

 

R version 4.3.2 was also added to address backwards compatibility for some user workflows. 

 

TEMPy-ReFF is the last of the new titles. TEMPy-ReFF is a flexible fitting and model refinement tool, using a Gaussian Mixture Modeling approach and gpu-accelerated molecular dynamics calculations. Developer tutorials can be found here: https://gitlab.com/topf-lab/tempy-reff-tutorials/.

 

Topaz releases 0.3.0 and 0.3.7 were pushed out. These latest versions contain a number of improved features, now allowing for larger training sets with mixed micrograph sizes and performance of particle extraction in patches. Topaz train now reports adjusted_precision, as a proportion of the theoretical max precision (pi), and can now read long argument lists using "@list_of_many_files.txt" in place of filenames or wildcards.

 

Schrodinger 2024-4 is the new default. This version includes numerous updates and bug fixes across the suite, including enhanced CryoEM surface performance in the Maestro interface. Notably, this release no longer supports the FlexLM License format., but uses Schrodinger’s new license manager. See https://www.schrodinger.com/life-science/download/release-notes/ for more information.

 

Warp 2.0.0dev31 is a minor update that includes a variety of bug fixes and updates.

 

Please note that not all software applications are available to every SBGrid member type. If you see an application that you would like to use, but is not included in your software tree, please contact us to find out what options are available for access.

 

This newsletter is sent to you because you are a member or affiliate of the SBGrid Consortium.

 

More information about the SBGrid Consortium is available at https://sbgrid.org

Report software bugs: sbgrid.org/bugs

 

 

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