SBGrid closed December 23-January 1

SBGrid Newsletter: December 2025

Dear Consortium Members and Affiliates,

 

We have an abbreviated update for our winter holiday newsletter, as we prepare for the Harvard winter recess. Read on for details about our holiday closure, a reminder to mark your calendar for our January webinar, and a software push with 16 updates and three new titles.

 

Warm holiday wishes to all from the SBGrid Team!

Many thanks to all of our members for your participation and consistent feedback, which helps to shape the future direction of SBGrid. We look forward to continuing our work together in 2026!

 

SBGrid offices will be closed from December 3lst to January 1st for the Harvard winter break. During that time we’ll keep an eye out for the big stuff, but will reply to most support requests upon our return in January. 

 

Our January software webinar will feature Sliz Lab postdoc Alice-Roza Eruera on Building CryoET Training Workflows Using the SBGrid Ecosystem. Be sure to join us on January 13th!

 

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

January 13:  Alice-Roza Eruera - Building CryoET Training Workflows Using the SBGrid Ecosystem

February 10: Open Free Energy

March 10:  Open Force Field

April 14: Jose Luis Vilas - Image processing made it simple with scipionTomo

May 12: Jarrett Johnson - PyMOL

June 9: Mart Last -  Ais and Pom

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 BioEmu, BoltzGen, ChimeraX, DOCK, Google Cloud SDK, HADDOCK3, NAMD, OpenFold, ORCA, pytom-match-pick, pyTME, SamTOOLS, Schrödinger 2025-3 and 2025-4, and Topaz along with three new titles: CryomaskR,  METEOR, and REPIC. See Software Changes below for complete details.

 

Three new members joined since our last report: Vera Moiseenkova-Bell from University of Pennsylvania, Cesar Santiago from Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia, and Paul Seidler from University of Southern California. Welcome to our newest members!

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.

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.

 

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

 

We 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: 

 

Elizabeth Campbell from The Rockefeller University in Nature Microbiology: Transcription co-inhibition alters drug resistance evolution and enhances Mycobacterium tuberculosis clearance from granulomas.

 

Catherine Drennan from MIT in Science Advances: How ATP and dATP reposition class III ribonucleotide reductase cone domains to regulate enzyme activity.

 

Carsten Sachse from Forschungszentrum Jülich in Nature Communications:

Structural organization of p62 filaments and the cellular ultrastructure of calcium-rich p62-enwrapped lipid droplet cargo.

 

David Jeruzalmi from City College of New York in Nucleic Acids Research:

Distinct quaternary states, intermediates, and autoinhibition during loading of the DnaB-replicative helicase by the phage λP helicase loader.

Software Changes

New Software

CryomaskR 1.0.0 is a desktop application that provides WYSIWYG mask generation for cryo-electron microscopy data analysis. It offers an intuitive graphical interface with real-time visual feedback, eliminating the need for complex command-line operations and iterative scripting cycles. The tool integrates with standard cryoEM file formats, and includes advanced masking capabilities for complex structures and membrane proteins.

https://mcalbyrne.com/cryomaskr.html

 

METEOR 0.3.9 is a tool for computing crystallographic difference maps that specializes in robust identification of weak signals from minor populations such as bound ligands or time-resolved experimental changes. It maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio through structure factor amplitude weighting and TV denoising, while automatically setting parameters using negentropy maximization to minimize user bias. The package provides two command-line scripts for different approaches: meteor.diffmap for fast k-weighted TV-denoised maps and meteor.phaseboost for iterative phase retrieval with potentially better results.

https://github.com/rs-station/meteor

 

REPIC 1.0.0 (REliable PIcking by Consensus) is a consensus methodology for harnessing multiple cryo-EM particle picking algorithms. It identifies particles common to multiple picked particle sets (i.e., consensus particles) using graph theory and integer linear programming (ILP). Picked particle sets may be found by a human specialist (manual), template matching, mathematical function (e.g., RELION's Laplacian-of-Gaussian auto-picking), or machine-learning method.

https://github.com/ccameron/REPIC 

 

Updated Software

BioEmu 1.2.0 includes support for extra residue embeddings, improved performance through KDTree implementation replacing mdtraj.compute_contacts to mitigate memory errors, and updates to the DPM solver. The release also adds input sequence validity checking, changes the default random seed to use system time instead of zero, and includes a toy example of PPFT training along with various documentation improvements.

https://github.com/microsoft/bioemu/releases/tag/v.1.2.0

 

BoltzGen 0.1.8 fixes antibody-related documentation and file names while adding the "antibody-anything" protocol to the CLI. This release includes performance improvements with clamped analyze worker thread pools to prevent oversubscribing, SLURM example configurations, and training fixes along with model checkpoint loading updates.

https://github.com/HannesStark/boltzgen/releases/tag/v0.1.8

 

ChimeraX daily build 20251126 was added for Linux (the daily build for Mac was added last month), which allows users to run Botlz2 through ChimeraX natively. 

https://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/trac/ChimeraX/wiki/ChangeLog 

 

DOCK 3.8 includes new mol2 output with full atom typing and bond information, improved sampling algorithms with better control, multiple ligand pose output, decreased memory usage, and improved hydroxyl sampling. The update also adds per-atom scoring function breakdowns and removes clashed conformation generation.

https://dock.compbio.ucsf.edu/DOCK3.8/index.html

 

Google Cloud SDK 548 adds the gcloud run compose up command, support for the --readiness-probe flag for gcloud run services command groups,  --no-build flag to gcloud run deploy, and --source command in beta. 

https://docs.cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/release-notes  

 

HADDOCK3 2025.11.0 includes updates to dependencies and minor bug fixes.

https://github.com/haddocking/haddock3/releases/tag/2025.11.0 

 

NAMD 3.0.2 point release fixes bugs in the Colvars module that impact versions 3.0,  3.0.1, and earlier NAMD 2 versions.

https://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/3.0.2/announce.html 

 

OpenFold 2.2.0 introduces multimer inference support using AlphaFold-Multimer weights, single-sequence inference (SoloSeq) using ESM-1b embeddings, and a custom DeepSpeed DS4Sci_EvoformerAttention kernel providing 13x reduced peak memory and 4x inference speedup. This release also includes upgrades to PyTorch 2, CUDA 12, NumPy 2, and PyTorch Lightning 2.5, adds comprehensive documentation at ReadTheDocs, ModelCIF output format support, and numerous training stability improvements including FP16 fixes.

https://github.com/aqlaboratory/openfold/releases/tag/v2.2.0

 

ORCA 6.1.1 irons out glitches that remained following the release of ORCA 6.1 and improves documentation.

https://www.faccts.de/customer 

 

pytom-match-pick 0.12.1 includes bugfixes for argparse validation and corrects the conversion factor for microns to meters in Warp XML files.

https://github.com/SBC-Utrecht/pytom-match-pick/releases/tag/0.12.1

 

pyTME 0.3.3 introduces on-the-fly score background correction for commonly used scores and extends analysis support for pytme_runner to simplify large dataset analysis. The update includes extended analyzer support for the Jax backend with additional aggregation operations like constrained matching, along with internal improvements to filter composition and transformation matrix handling.

https://github.com/KosinskiLab/pyTME/releases/tag/v0.3.3

 

SamTOOLS 1.23 adds new features, including richer reference statistics in samtools stats, faster handling of reference caches, new depth filtering for samtools coverage, and better control over read groups, UMIs, and soft-clipped reads in FASTQ output. Performance and usability are improved with more efficient file splitting and clearer help and documentation, including new support information. This update also fixes some bugs, cleans up memory leaks, and introduces code quality improvements in general.

https://github.com/samtools/samtools/releases/tag/1.23 

 

Schrödinger 2025-3 introduces performance improvements including nearly 2x faster Glide docking, 5x faster FFBuilder with the new MPNICE potential, and enhanced AI capabilities with the new Maestro Assistant beta for conversational help and natural language commands. The release adds comprehensive nucleic acid modeling workflows, an improved FEP+ settings interface, machine learning force field (MLFF) support across multiple modules, and expanded materials science capabilities including ionic conductivity predictions and coarse-grained molecular dynamics enhancements.

https://www.schrodinger.com/life-science/download/release-notes/release-2025-3/

 

Schrödinger 2025-4 includes enhancements across small molecule and biologics drug discovery, materials science, and platform capabilities. Key updates include interactive Core Hopping in Ligand Designer for exploring diverse chemical space, full release of TCR structure prediction through TCRBuilder2, expanded Mixed Solvent MD with immiscible probes for cryptic pocket identification, and new defect formation energy workflows in Quantum ESPRESSO. This release also introduces Form Templates in LiveDesign, improved Maestro Assistant functionality, and comprehensive coarse-grained modeling capabilities for complex bilayer systems.

https://www.schrodinger.com/life-science/download/release-notes/

 

Topaz 0.3.17 is now available. There is no changelog for this release.

https://github.com/tbepler/topaz/releases/tag/v0.3.17

 

 

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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