Advanced Course in Protein Crystallography: Phenix 2012

Last week we had a wonderful workshop, as noted in the title. As guest we had:

Paul Adams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA
Thomas C. Terwilliger, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA
Pavel Afonine, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA
Nat Echols, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA
Jeff Headd, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA

We all meet at the Instituto de Química, UNAM that provides state-of-the-art installations for this type of workshops as well as X ray diffraction for protein structure determination.
During three days we examine the theory and practice of protein structure using Phenix, or Python-based Hierarchical ENvironment for Integrated Xtallography. And it is an awesome piece of software. Its design philosophy is such that every piece of code is integrated into the GUI and every program tries its best to streamline the process of structure determination. We also got a brief intro into Coot, a Crystallographic Object-Oriented Toolkit which is the de facto standard for protein structure visualization and refinement.

The installations IQ provided were spacious, well suited and more than large enough to accommodate all the participants as well as the computers used on the hands-on tutorials. The quality of the workshop was such that I was inspired to try and organize meetings such as this one.

I learned so much that I am still getting my head around it. So, to close this post here are the "official" group pictures:

Ps. Afterword, I was trying to get osxutils to work in Mac OS X Lion but they are no longer in Fink for that OS X version. Since I had a .deb package in my Snow Leopard machine I gave the command line a change. Thus,

sudo dpkg -i osxutils_1.7-1_darwin-x86_64.deb 

did the trick!

My next post will be about the uses of osxutils.