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Clipper
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Requirements for the manipulation of atomic models in crystallographic calculations are very varied, and often the objects required must be tailored to the specific calculation. Therefore, Clipper provides only the minimum tools required for atomic models to interact with structure factors and maps. More advanced facilities are provided through optional packages.
The most common interaction between atomic models and structure factors or maps is through electron density or mask calculation. For this purpose, only a subset of atomic properties are required: element, coordinate, occupancy and temperature factor (U-value). Clipper therefore provides a simple class, clipper::Atom, which contains this information. It has a template constructor which allows it to be initialised from any Atom-like object.
Electron density and mask calculations require a list of atoms, therefore a simple class for holding a list of atoms, clipper::Atom_list is provided. This is a trivial extension of std::vector<clipper::Atom>, and provides a template constructor to build an atom list from any vector-like object of atom-like objects. Atom lists can also be constructed using the standard vector methods, e.g. push_back(), insert().
Clipper methods requiring an atom list, e.g. a structure factor calculation may be given a Clipper::Atom_list, any class derived from that class, or a std::vector<clipper::Atom> as an argument.
Two optional packages are provided for model manipulation. Both require the the 'MMDB' coordinate library by E. Krissinel to be installed (see http://msd.ebi.ac.uk/~keb/cldoc/).
The MMDB interface is a lightweight interface to allow MMDB to be used with Clipper. It consists of one main class: clipper::MMDBAtom_list. This is a trivial extension of clipper::Atom_list which may be used anywhere an Atom_list would be used. It provides an additional constructor which will build an atom list from an MMDB atom selection (i.e. PPCAtom + count).
Other classes are provided which may optionally be used to access information in the MMDB hierarchy in the form of Clipper objects. These are trivial extensions of MMDB objects. The MMDB objects may therefore be cast to the Clipper types to access the additional conversion methods.
The MiniMol package is a lightweight, STL based implementation of a small subset of the MMDB functionality. It provides simpler tools for manipulating single models and their constituents. The use of STL-style code means that no memory management is required, and all common operations such as assignment and passing variables have the most obvious effect.
The minimum necessary information is stored for each object in the hierarchy, however additional information of any type may be added to any object through use of the clipper::PropertyManager.
Basic searching and selection tools are provided, and logical 'and' and 'or' operators may be used to combine models, polymers, and monomers.
MiniMol provides an MMDBfile class which may be used to extract models from and store models back into an MMDB, or a file.
If you have very specific model requirements, you may be better off writing your own objects tailored to those requirements, and then deriving an Atom_list class to allow your objects to be communicated to Clipper. Otherwise, consider the following points:
MiniMol will do simple tasks much more easily than MMDB, but it won't do hard tasks at all. If MiniMol does everything you will need (or can easily be extended to do so), then it is probably a good choice, otherwise use MMDB.
1.7.4