Getting started with CCP4

• Do source /prog/setup ccp4 (equivalent to ccp4_4.1.1) or
  or source /prog/setup ccp4_4.2 (or similarly for version 4.0) to set up the environment.
• Local copy of CCP4 v4.2 reference manual (HTML)
• Local copy of CCP4 v4.1.1 reference manual (HTML)
• Local copy of CCP4 v4.0 reference manual (HTML)
• Note the listing of programs by their function.
• CCP4 web site
• DM Density Modification Workshop
• CCP4i (version 1.01) Graphical Interface to CCP4 v3.5
  • This is now included in CCP4 versions 4+. See the local copy of the CCP4 manual for more information.
  • Introduction to the CCP4i interface including a tutorial
  • CCP4 Newsletter article about CCP4i (PostScript format)
  • See also the news for more information
• There is a CCP4 e-mail mailing list. Go to CCP4 Bulletin Board for information on how to sign up and how to access the archives.
• New A local archive of ccp4bb posts can be found here.
• New There are also copies of scripts that I frequently use with CCP4 in /prog/misc/scripts/ccp4.

The CCP4 program suite is a collection of disparate programs covering most of the computations required for macromolecular crystallography. They have been collected and developed under the auspices of the Collaborative Computing Project Number 4, in Protein Crystallography, supported by the UK Science and Engineering Research Council (serc) since 1979 and currently the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (bbsrc), and coordinated at Daresbury Laboratory.

Unlike many other packages, particularly for small molecule crystallography, the CCP4 suite is a set of separate programs which communicate via standard data files, rather than all operations being integrated into one huge program. This has some disadvantages in that it is less easy for programs to make decisions about what operation to do next--though it is seldom a problem in practice--and that the programs are less consistent with each other (although much work has recently been done to improve this). The advantage of loose organisation is that it is very easy to add new programs or to modify existing ones without upsetting other parts of the suite. This is the approach successfully taken by Unix.

Before trying to run any of the many CCP4 programs, you must set an environment variable via the main setup script:

 source /prog/setup ccp4

Starting with version 4.0 there is the CCP4i graphical user interface (GUI) that is started with the command ccp4i.

Tips

1. Most log files include information in a format that can be viewed graphically using the program xloggraph. Simply do:

   xloggraph your-log-file-name-here

   Or, if you are running version 4.0 or newer, you can use:

   loggraph your-log-file-name-here

   to use the loggraph program that comes with ccp4i
2. If you do want to look at the text in the log files and don't want to have to start up netscape because of the html in the log files then set this environment variable:

   setenv CCP_SUPPRESS_HTML yes

   before running a CCP4 program.