From owner-biophysics@net.bio.net Sun Feb 07 22:00:00 1999 Message-ID: <36BE3682.977F323B@bioreason.com> Date: Sun, 07 Feb 1999 16:57:38 -0800 From: Andrew Dalke Organization: Bioreason, Inc. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.05 [en] (X11; U; IRIX 6.2 IP22) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: bionet.biophysics,bionet.xtallography Subject: Re: Is ignorant rambling, was: DNA Structure: An Age of Refinement... References: <36b81714.0@news.netdirect.net.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: dialup187.trail.com Lines: 29 Path: biosci!news.stanford.edu!su-news-feed2.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.gtei.net!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!newsfeed.xcom.net!newspeer.monmouth.com!news.lightlink.com!news4.his.com!dialup187.trail.com Xref: biosci bionet.biophysics:4761 bionet.xtallography:4583 On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Clive Delmonte wrote: > Many algorithms have been used to determine oligonucleotide structure, > such as, CORELS, DBLHLX, HELIX, NEWHELIX, NUCLSQ, SHELX93 and ULTIMA, > for example. Doubtless it would be unfair merely to assume that all > these programs, or the context of their use, incorporated directly or > indirectly, explicitly or implicitly, an a priori acceptance of the > DNA double helix, but, unfortunately, explicit details of the working > of the algorithms, and the context of their use, do not seem to be > widely and publicly available. I'm not a crystallographer, but I just did a quick search for SHELX93 on Altavista. The page: http://www.esrf.fr/computing/expg/asciidoc/shelx.doc states: > SHELXL-93 is provided in source form as well as precompiled PC > versions. An application form is reproduced in Appendix F. > > The program is available free to academics (and for a modest license > fee to commercial institutions) subject to the condition that it is > acknowledged in all publications which report structures refined with > it. You can't get much better details of how something works than the source code. So why do you say this isn't "widely and publicly available"? Andrew dalke@acm.org .