Coot
Hello. Welcome to Coot.
What does Coot stand for?
Crystallographic Object-Oriented Toolkit
What does it do?
Coot is for macromolecular model building, model completion and validation, particularly suitable for protein modelling using X-ray data.
Coot displays maps and models and allows model manipulations such as idealization, real space refinement, manual rotation/translation, rigid-body fitting, ligand search, solvation, mutations, rotamers, Ramachandran plots, skeletonization, non-crystallographic symmetry and more.
What's the latest stable release?
0.6.2
What's it like?
Coot has some features that resemble those of Frodo, O, Quanta and XtalView's XFit. It is a completely independent system of course. Coot doesn't do many aspects of structure represention (for example ribbons or sophisticated colouring schemes).
Coot is under development. New features are being added. There may be bugs.
Is there a Coot FAQ?
Yes.
Is there a Coot Mailing list?
There is a new and improved Coot email list now hosted by the jiscmail service :
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/coot.html
This was started on January 25th 2007. The old archives are available at the following link :
Is there Coot documentation?
Yes.
The 2010 CCP4 Study weekend presentation can be found here.
The 2004 CCP4 Study weekend presentation can be found here.
How do I cite Coot?
Please see the FAQ. Get the paper.
OK, how does it look?
Like this:
Hmm... very pretty. Any other piccies?
Try here.
What formats?
PDB, mmCIF, MTZ files, .phs and others.
It makes maps from MTZ and .phs files?
Yep.
Can it read conventional CCP4 maps?
Yep.
Can it read any other kind of map?
Yes, it can read CNS maps.
Is it scriptable?
Yep, hundreds of functions are made available to the user via SWIG and can be scripted in either Python or scheme.
Where do I get it?
- Source Code
- Binaries available here or here
- Pre-release Binaries
- FTP access to Binaries
Which binary to use? See the FAQ.
How do I install it?
Read the README in the source tar file.
What libraries do I need?
- fftw
- mmdb
- ccp4c
- clipper
- guile or Python
- glib
- GTK+-2 and gdk
- pthread
- gtkglext
- gnome-canvas
- zlib
- GSL
- GL
- GLU
- glut
Errg. Sounds complicated.
Yes, it is a bit. We build binary distributions every night. Perhaps one of those will work.
There is an "autobuilder" build script which we use to make build the binaries.
I should add that coot depends on many other projects, some general (GTk+, the GNU Scientific Library, python, guile, GL graphics libraries and toolkits) and others more specific to structural biology (mmdb, clipper) which are fundamental to the design and implementation of the program.
What is the licence?
Mostly GPLv3, some GLPv2+, some LGPLv3.
So I can just download it and use it, no questions asked?
Yep. Be my guest.
Even if I'm Big Pharma?
Yes. Try it out.
(Other options are available.)
On which platforms does it run?
Certainly on Ubuntu, Fedora (Core) Linux, Microsoft Windows, MacOS X and sometimes sgi. You can get WinCoot here.
Getting the Coot binaries to run on RHEL, or SuSe might take a bit more effort. Please see the Coot FAQ.
Do you have any independent testimonials?
Errr, not yet.
Will you ever release version 1.0?
Yes, there is a road-map to 1.0. ETA 18 months.
Not to be confused with:
Alwyn Jones' O, Quanta, XtalView, CCP4mg (warning: page can be slow to load).
What is the Coot holding in its beak, by the way?
It's biting off the terminal phosphate of an ATP.
And that's supposed to be an allusion to a biochemical process is it?
Err.. yes.
Most likely to say:
"Now how does that Refmac button work again..?"
Least likely to say:
"On reflection, it'd have been much better to implement using Tcl/Tk."
Oh, and by the way, do you read the Guardian?
It's been know...