Hi -

A year or so ago, I have asked as a referee somebody to provide for a paper the statistics for their heavy atom derivative dataset, and for the phasing statistics. For some good reasons, they were unable to do that, and they (politely) asked me 'what would it change if you knew these, isn't the structure we present impeccable?'. Well, I think they were right. Their structure was surely correct, surely high quality. After that incident and giving it some thought, I fail to see why should one report e.g. PP or Rcullis, or why will I care what they were if the structure has a convincing Rfree and is properly validated. If someone wants to cheat at the end of the day, its easy to provide two numbers, but its hard to provide a good validated model that agrees with the data. (and, yes, you can also make up the data, but we have been there, haven't we?!?)

So, my question to that referee, likely being a ccp4bb aficionado that is reading this email, or to anyone else really, is:

"What would it help to judge the quality of the structure or the paper if you know PP, Rcullis and FOM?"

Best -

A.

PS Especially since you used SHELXE for phasing these statistics are utterly irrelevant, and possibly you could advice the referee to read a bit about how SHELXE works ... or go to one of the nice courses that George teaches ...

On Apr 12, 2010, at 10:37, Eleanor Dodson wrote:

You can feed the SHELX sites into phaser_er or CRANK both of which will
give this sort of information.

Or mlphare if you know how to set it up..

Eleanor


Harmer, Nicholas wrote:
Dear CCP4ers,

I've been asked by a referee to provide the phasing statistics for a SAD dataset that I used to solve a recent structure. Whilst I have been able to find a figure-of-merit for the data after phasing, I can't work out how to get any other statistics (e.g. phasing power or an equivalent or Rcullis). Does anyone know a good route to obtaining useful statistics to put in the paper for SAD data?

The structure solution was carried out using SHELX C/D/E and then ARP/wARP.

Thanks in advance,

Nic Harmer

=====================
Dr. Nic Harmer
School of Biosciences
University of Exeter
tel: +44 1392 725179


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