OVERVIEW OF THE COLLABORATIVE COMPUTATIONAL PROJECT No. 4

Martyn Winn

CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington, WA4 4AD, U.K.
E-mail: m.d.winn@dl.ac.uk (personal), E-mail: ccp4@dl.ac.uk (CCP4 problems)
URL: http://www.dl.ac.uk/CCP/CCP4/martyn/martyn.html

The Collaborative Computational Project No. 4 (CCP4) was established in 1979 by the UK Science and Engineering Research Council (and now supported by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) to support collaboration between groups writing software for macromolecular crystallography. CCP4 now supports a large suite of programs covering most of the computations required for macromolecular crystallography, and in addition supports a number of educational activities to aid crystallographers in applying these and other programs to real problems. The CCP4 program suite consists of a library of commonly-used routines, together with a set of distinct application programs which interact with each other via standard data files. The philosophy is to allow individual programs to be modified easily, and new programs added easily, so that users gain rapid access to state-of-the art algorithms. This talk will give an overview of the activities of CCP4, together with a description of the general features of the program suite, which will be expanded on in later talks. Recent initiatives, such as the graphical user interface and the mmCIF data format, will also be introduced.