[3dem] Announcing EMAN2/SPARX release 2.03

[Steven Ludtke]

It came to my attention at the GRC a couple of weeks ago that, while we formally released EMAN2 at the beginning
of the year, and it's been used in several published subnanometer resolution structures now, that I never
formally announced it here. I will leave Pawel to describe the features/changes in SPARX, but it IS distributed
as part of the same EMAN2/SPARX binary installation.

Anyway, I'm happy to announce the release of EMAN2/SPARX 2.03, released on July 12th, 2011. This is the 3rd
release version of EMAN2. 

http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2

Major new features in EMAN2 :

* A brand new EMAN1->EMAN2 transition guide is now available (http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/Eman1Transition)
* A number of complete tutorials (with data) 
  http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/Tutorials
  http://blake.bcm.edu/emanwiki/EMAN2/VideoTutorials
* A new single particle refinement process, typically 5-30x faster than EMAN1, giving the user much more control over
 the specific methods used during the reconstruction process, and producing better structures with the 
 same data (when used optimally).
* A new model for automatic CTF correction and SSNR measurement, fully integrated into the reconstruction process
* single particle tomography (fully functional but continuing development)
* Random conical tilt, orthogonal tilt, and Henderson-style tilt validation (functional, but continuing development)
* Integrated use of outside tools available: Frealign (fully functional), future support for XMIPP, others
* Support for 3 different parallel processing systems, including MPI for use on supercomputers 
 (also CUDA support for some applications)
* All user programs including graphical interface written in Python, permitting advanced users to make modifications
 without having to recompile from source

New graphical tools:
* e2workflow, an integrated workflow for:
	* single particle reconstruction
	* single particle tomography
	* reference-free 2-D particle analysis
	* launching FreAlign jobs seeded with EMAN2 results
* e2display, a file browser and viewer for:
	* 2d images & stacks
	* 3d volumes
	* 2-D & 3-D plots
	* exploring header information in almost any file format
* e2filtertool, a tool for interactively building sequences of filters, masks, etc. and adjusting parameters
* e2evalparticles, to interactively explore particle quality, and exclude particles from reconstructions
* e2tomoboxer, a 3-D particle picker for tomograms, part
* e2helixboxer, for selecting filamentous structures (IHRSR under development)
* e2RCTboxer, simultaneous picking of tilt-pairs
* e2ctf, both an interactive CTF fitting program and a powerful data quality assessment tool

As always, questions and suggestions are welcome. If something isn't working for you, please 
don't hesitate to email and ask about it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Ludtke, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Co-Director National Center For Macromolecular Imaging
Dept of Biochemistry and Mol. Biol.
Baylor College of Medicine
sludtke at bcm.edu
stevel at alumni.caltech.edu