[Chimera-users] imgCIF files

[Mattia Rocco]

Hi Tom,

many thanks also to you for another fast and very informative answer! I 
didn't know that RasMol could read ccp4 maps, but at the moment it will not 
save a generated map in that format. I have recently contacted the RasMol 
developers, and Dr. Bernstein wrote back to me that he will make a save in 
ccp4 format option available, so in the end the circle will be hopefully 
closed... ;-)

Best wishes - Mattia

At 10.31 04/05/2011 -0700, Tom Goddard wrote:
>Hi Mattia,
>
>   I put imgCIF support on the Chimera feature request list
>
>     http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/wiki/requests
>
>I don't expect it is likely to get done for several reasons.  From what I 
>read on the web imgCIF was developed for recording 2-d x-ray diffraction 
>spot data.  Chimera cannot do anything with that kind of data.  In 2007 
>there was some work done to make it handle 3-dimensional density maps and 
>it was included in RasMol for that purpose.  There was also some talk of a 
>PyMol plug-in to read the 3-d imgCIF maps but I don't know if anything 
>came of that.  It looks like this format is not used by most map display 
>programs.  RasMol also uses CCP4 which Chimera reads, as does almost every 
>other map display program.  And as Elaine pointed out, Chimera can 
>directly create maps from atomic models.
>
>   New volume data formats are easy to support in Chimera with Python 
> code.  If someone wants to provide and imgCIF reader/writer in Python I 
> could put it into Chimera if the code is well written.
>
>     Tom
>
>>is there any intention of implementing the uploading of imgCIF density 
>>maps files? Such files can be generated by RasMol starting from either 
>>atomic structures or low-resolution bead models (e.g. SAXS-derived models).
>>
>>Conversely, it would be nice if density maps could be generated within 
>>Chimera...
>
>
>