MMDB is a powerful package for the storage and manipulation of atomic coordinate models, by E. Krissinel. Full documentation for the MMDB package is available here: http://msd.ebi.ac.uk/~keb/cldoc/
The Clipper-MMDB interface package provides an interface to allow MMDB models to interact with other types of crystallographic data as part of a structure solution application. It is designed to be minimally intrusive on both packages, so that either package may be used alone, or in conjunction with other software.
The most common interactions between atomic models, structure factors, maps, and masks come in the form of the generation of structure factors, electron density and masks from a model. For these purposes, most of the information in an atomic model (e.g. bonding, residue types), is redundant; all we need is a list of atomic coordinates, elements, occupancies and temperature factors (U-values). These are handled by the Clipper classes clipper::Atom and clipper::Atom_list.
MMDB describes atom lists in terms of an array of pointers to atoms, and a count (of types PPCAtom and int). These are commonly generated using a selection function to select some portion of the stored atomic model.
The main component of the Clipper-MMDB interface is therefore a class which communicated atom lists from one package to the other.
The clipper::MMDBAtom_list class is a trivial derivation of the clipper::Atom_list class which can be constructed from an MMDB atom list. This involves extracting all the relevant information from MMDB and building a new list of clipper::Atom objects, but this list is both small and quickly created in comparison to any purpose for which it will be used. The clipper::MMDBAtom_list class may be used wherever a clipper::Atom_list would be used, e.g. in a structure factor calculation.
A typical usage is therefore as follows:
For example, the following code reads a PDB file from disk, selects all the atoms from the model, and uses them to perform a structure factors calculation:
/* mmdb part of the calculation */ CMMDBManager mmdb; mmdb.ReadPDBASCII( "input.pdb" ); // read pdb file int hndl = mmdb.NewSelection(); // make selection handle mmdb.SelectAtoms( hndl, 0, 0, SKEY_NEW ); // select all atoms PPCAtom psel; int nsel; mmdb.GetSelIndex( hndl, psel, nsel ); // get the selection /* Clipper part of the calculation */ clipper::HKL_info hkls; // make reflection lists for result /* *********************************************************** */ /* NOTE: we need to initialise the reflection list 'hkls' here */ /* *********************************************************** */ clipper::HKL_data<clipper::data32::F_phi> fphi(hkls); // and data list clipper::MMDBAtom_list atoms( psel, nsel ); // make atom list clipper::SFcalc_aniso_fft<float>( fphi, atoms ); // and do SF calc
Note that we have assumed that the reflection list has been initialised in the intervening code. For this, spacegroup and cell information are required. If that information is to be obtained from the PDB file from MMDB, some additional functions are required, which will be described below.
Sometimes we need to communicate other information between Clipper and MMDB. For example, as above, we may want to use the spacegroup or cell information from MMDB in Clipper.
For this purpose, additional classes are provided. In every case, these are trivial derivations of MMDB classes (i.e. adding no additional data members), which simply add additional functions for communicating information to or from MMDB in terms of Clipper types. The following classes are provided:
Of these, the clipper::MMDBManager and clipper::MMDBAtom classes are probably the most useful.
Since these classes are trivial derivations, you can safely cast a pointer or reference to your MMDB object to the derived type in order to gain access to the addition methods. C and C++ casts are permissible, although the C++ static_cast mechanism provides better type safety.
This provides 4 additional methods in addition to the MMDB version. These are used for getting and setting the cell and spacegroup information. They are:
The first two return the spacegroup and cell from MMDB, and the last two set the spacegroup and cell.
When fetching the MMDB spacegroup, if the operators are present then these will be used to determine the Clipper spacegroup. If the operators are missing, the spacegroup name will be used. When setting the spacegroup the name is always set, however the operators will only be set if MMDB recognizes the Clipper spacegroup name.
Therefore, to return a clipper::Cell from a PDB file, the following code is used:
CMMDBManager mmdb; mmdb.ReadPDBASCII( "input.pdb" ); // read pdb file clipper::Cell cell = static_cast<clipper::MMDBManager&>(mmdb).cell();
(Alternatively, if we created a clipper::MMDBManager in the first place, no cast would be required.)
The following example shows how a reference to the CMMDBManager in the structure factor calculation above could be cast to return the spacegroup and cell information.
clipper::MMDBManager& cmmdb = static_cast<clipper::MMDBManager&>( mmdb ); hkls.init( cmmdb.spacegroup(), cmmdb.cell(), clipper::Resolution(2.0) );
The clipper::MMDBAtom class is used in exactly the same way as the previous class to obtain access to atom properties as Clipper data items. For example, given a pointer to an MMDB CAtom, the coordinates, occupancy and anisotropic U could be extracted as follows:
PCAtom atom; /* set the atom pointer here */ clipper::MMDBAtom* catom = static_cast<clipper::MMDBAtom*>( atom ); clipper::Coord_orth coord = catom->coord_orth(); double occup = catom->occupancy(); clipper::U_aniso_orth uanis = catom->u_aniso_orth();
If the requested property of the MMDB atom is not set, then the corresponding Clipper object will be set to its null state, which is tested by the corresponding is_null method, e.g. clipper::Coord_orth::is_null(). In the case of numeric properties, if they are missing the result will be NaN, testable by the clipper::Util::is_nan() method.
Write accessors ('set' methods) are also provided for all properties where MMDB permits. Null objects will be translated to unset properties in MMDB.
1.6.1