CIFters: Object Oriented Tools for Manipulating Crystallographic Information Files (CIF)

9310154 Bourne The macromolecular crystallography community has recently adopted a standard set of data definitions as extension to that subset already derived for small molecule crystallography and referred to as the Crystallographic Information File (CIF). Macromolecular CIF definitions will facilitate the highly desireable features of simpler information exchange and a rich controlled vocabulary for use world-wide by scientists in an expanding discipline. Speedy adoption of CIF requires flexible, interoperable, and portable software tools. The investigators will build a class library and a set of tools based on the object-oriented software technology to browse, edit, display, query, verify and format CIF files, called CIFters. In addition, CIFters will be callable from existing programs in common use in macromolecular crystallography facilitating access to CIF files, further promoting the use of CIF. The long term goal of this project is to develop extensible software tools which are widely available to the structural biology community. In addition, this award support an end-user workshop to begin the effort to design the appropriate CIFters. ***