SBGrid Newsletter: February 2025

Dear Consortium Members and Affiliates,

 

March is upon us and we are here with the latest news from SBGrid, including a reminder about how to request support, a link to a recording of our February webinar, a date for our upcoming DeepMainmast/DAQ webinar, a software push with nine updates and six new titles, two new members to welcome, and two member publication highlights.

 

As the storm intensifies around the US we know that many groups are facing new challenges. Although insufficient to the need, please let us know if there is help that we can provide on the software front:  

  • Register for personal installation manager credentials to manage a subset of applications on your Linux or Mac laptop/workstations at home or in the lab: https://sbgrid.org/registration/register/
  • Submit a support ticket if you'd like to request new software or an update to an existing title, report a bug, or notify us about other issues: https://sbgrid.org/help/

  • Visit our support wiki for help with common questions: https://sbgrid.org/wiki/Home

Our February software webinar featuring João Rodrigues presenting on Phenix/OPLS and GlideEM - Enabling cryoEM structures for drug discovery with the Schrodinger Suite - is now available on the SBGrid YouTube channel. Next up, join us March 11th to hear from Genki Terashi on Structure modeling and Validation using AI-based methods with DeepMainmast and DAQ.

 

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

Mar 11: Genki Terashi - Structure modeling and Validation using AI-based methods: DeepMainmast and DAQ

Apr 8: Dimitry Tegunov - Warp

May 13: Ellen Zhong - DRGN-AI

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.

This month's software push includes updates to AlphaFold, AmberTools, Boltz-1, DeepEMhancer, DiffDock, FPSim2, IMOD, PDBExtract, and USF Gerard Utilities, along with six new titles: CryFold, CryoSamba, DomainSeeker, GAPSTOP(TM), LucaProt, and polychrom. See Software Changes below for complete details.

 

Two new members joined in the month of February: Krishna Chinthalapudi from Ohio State University and Meghna Gupta from Oregon Health and Sciences University. Welcome to our newest members!

Community Announcements

From our members at EMBL Grenoble:

We are delighted to announce the Scientific Programme for the 7th  International Symposium on Diffraction Structural Biology (ISDSB2025), taking place from 5–7 May 2025 at the European Photon and Neutron Science (EPN) Campus in Grenoble, France. It will be hosted by Partnership for Structural Biology (PSB) between European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) and the Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS).

 

Full details at https://www.psb-grenoble.eu/isdsb2025/

Registration deadline: 1 April 2025.

Member Publication Highlights

From our graduate student desk

Over 100 new member publications appeared in journals this month. You can find a complete listing on our website, along with a couple of notable highlights below:

 

- Caltech doctoral student Vida Storm Robertson highlighted a publication in JACS from SBGrid member Matteo Dal Peraro of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne that shows a high resolution structure of the machine bacteria use to attack our cells. [Read more]

 

- Meharry Medical College Ph.D. candidate KeAndreya Morrison's highlight features a publication in Science Advances from the laboratory of Eilika Weber-Ban of ETH Zurich that reveals transcription factor PafBC in mycobacteria is directly activated by single-stranded DNA (ssDNA), linking DNA damage to the bacterial stress response and offering potential targets for antibiotic development. [Read more]

 

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 five new citations since our last reporting, from these SBGrid members: 

 

Ignacio Mir-Sanchis of Umeå University in Nature Communications: Phage parasites targeting phage homologous recombinases provide antiviral immunity; Member laboratories at UT Southwestern in The Journal of Clinical Investigation: An FDA-approved drug structurally and phenotypically corrects the K210del mutation in genetic cardiomyopathy models; Chad Rienstra and Elizabeth Wright from University of Wisconsin-Madison in bio-protocol Journal: High-resolution Cryo-EM Structure Determination of a-Synuclein—A Prototypical Amyloid Fibril; and M. Gordon Joyce from National Institutes of Health in Immunity: Structural basis for complement receptor engagement and virus neutralization through Epstein-Barr virus gp350.

Software Changes

AlphaFold was updated to 3.0.1 with new features, improvements to performance and documentation, and many bug fixes. New features include the flags --max_template_date, --diffusion_num_samples, --num_recycles, --num_seeds, and an option to specify MSA and templates as external files instead of inline in the input JSON. See the release for more features and improvements.

 

AmberTools was updated to version 24, which includes several new features: inclusion of the ABCG2 charge model for GAFF2, the Quick package for Hartree-Fock and DFT electronic structure calculations, with GPU support, and fe-toolkit, an updated package of routines to analyze alchemical free energy calculations, along with many cpptraj updates.

 

Boltz-1 0.4.1 was updated to include full data processing pipelines and documentation, updated evaluations, including code, results and predictions, and pocket conditioning that allows users to set specific pocket residues in your configs.

 

CryFold 1.3.2 is new to SBGrid. CryFold automatically constructs full-atom 3D structural models of proteins based on cryo-EM density maps and sequence information. It uses two main stages: the first step predicts the Cα atom coordinates from the density map, and the second step builds the full-atom model by combining the sequence and density map information. Finally, the full-atom model will undergo post-processing to generate the final protein model.

 

CryoSamba 1 is a new addition to the sbgrid collection. CryoSamba is used for denoising cryo-ET datasets using a deep-learning based approach and accepts .mrc, .rc and .tif inputs.

 

DeepDeWedge is also new to the collection at version 20250128. DeepDeWedge implements a deep learning method for simultaneous denoising and missing wedge reconstruction in cryogenic electron tomography.

 

DeepEMhancer 20241203_5f64fe8_cu11 is now available. This latest commit from the deepemhancer git repository on github includes a few bug fixes and CUDA 11.8, which is compatible with newer GPU cards.

 

DiffDock 1.1.3 includes a fix for a bug causing the atom graph to contain many incorrect atoms, issues with different sequences and order, as well as setting NaNs and Infs in model scores to a small value. A typo was corrected, and initialization files were added to all Python modules. Docker command instructions in the README.md file were also updated. 

 

DomainSeeker is new to SBGrid at version 20250204. DomainSeeker is a tool for identifying protein domains in cryo-ET maps of protein complexes. It uses AlphaFold2-predicted models to divide proteins into domains based on predicted alignment errors and a graph-based algorithm, then fits these domains into segmented density maps. A scoring system is applied to determine the most likely domain for each map.

 

FPSim2 was updated to release 0.7.3. This release includes a fix to the returned number of results in a top-K search in parallel (results were correct but brought more than K due to parallelization), an added exception SQLA backend can't run on disk searches, and upgrades to deprecated upload-artifact and download-artifact v3 github actions versions with v4.

 

GAPSTOP(TM) is new at version 0.3. GAPSTOP(TM) is a GPU-Accelerated Python STOPgap for Template Matching (TM) in cryo electron tomograms based on TM routines from STOPGAP. 

 

IMOD 5.1.0 is a major version update and includes extensive changes, with noteworthy additions to Tilt and Tiltalign to perform reconstruction from raw stack images and apply linear scaling and cross validation. Complete release notes are available on the developer website here: https://bio3d.colorado.edu/imod/changes5.1.html

 

PDBExtract was updated to release 4.2 for both Mac and Linux users with a new architecture that uses python under the hood. The title contains tools and examples for extracting data from many structure determination applications and assembles the data into mmCIF format suitable for wwPDB deposition.

 

polychrom is another new title at version 0.1.1. Polychrom is a Python library for simulating chromatin dynamics and 3D genome organization using polymer physics models. It provides tools for running molecular dynamics simulations, analyzing chromatin structure, and comparing results with experimental data like Hi-C or imaging.

 

LucaProt is another new one at version 20241112. LucaProt is a novel deep learning framework that incorporates protein amino acid sequence and structural information to predict protein function.

 

USF Gerard Utilities was updated to 20250213, an alpha build of Uppsala Software Factory for 64-bit MacOS.

 

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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