International summer school on macromolecular crystallographic computing. Final report

The School was the seventh in a series of International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) Crystallographic Symposia. The format of the School was formal lectures in the morning, tutorials in the afternoon, and software demonstrations and more lectures in the evening. The full program which left both the organizers and attendees exhausted, reflects the current state of excitement in the field of macromolecular structure determination using the technique of X-ray crystallography. The new and improved technologies and techniques described in these Proceedings are contributing to that growth and at the same time, as pointed out in the paper given by Sussman, creating challenges for the Protein Data Bank (PDB). As the School progressed, the authors were struck by the similarities to events which took place in small molecule crystallography beginning some 20 to 25 years ago. Growth then was fueled by the advent of new algorithms, affordable computer hardware, and good software. So it is today for macromolecular crystallography, but with the added bonus of the Internet which is changing how scientist conduct their research. Flack presented this view as part of his on-going contribution to how crystallographers use the Internet. After presentations discussing structures en masse they returned to the more traditional mode of presentation which parallels the determination of a single macromolecular structure: data collection -- phasing -- model building and visualization -- refinement