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...