[chimerax-users] Any interest in reading ModelArchive metadata from mmCIF files?

[Ben Webb]

Do you have any plans to extend ChimeraX's mmCIF reader to parse and 
display metadata on theoretical models, such as quality scores or the 
alignments to template structures?

The folks at PDB have recently done a lot of work to standardize this 
metadata in the MA mmCIF dictionary:
https://mmcif.wwpdb.org/dictionaries/mmcif_ma.dic/Index/

The dictionary has already been adopted by ModelArchive (e.g. AlphaFold2 
models) and by ModBase (Modeller models) and I believe that other 
repositories such as SwissModel are also moving in that direction. See 
e.g. mmCIF downloads at
https://www.modelarchive.org/doi/10.5452/ma-bak-cepc-0250
https://modbase.compbio.ucsf.edu/modbase-cgi/model_search.cgi?databaseID=Q12321

(My ulterior motive: we've previously built Chimera web data files to 
download a ModBase model and the accompanying alignment, and display 
them in Chimera; now that this data is embedded in the mmCIF file, in 
principle ChimeraX could do this itself in a less clunky and not 
ModBase-specific fashion.)

	Ben
-- 
ben at salilab.org                      https://salilab.org/~ben/
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."
	- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle