[3dem] Announcing the release of EMAN/SPARX 2.12

[Ludtke, Steven J]

Announcing EMAN2.12

We are pleased to announce the release of EMAN/SPARX2.12

On the EMAN side, this is a more significant release than 2.11 and includes a range of new features, not just bugfixes. Major changes include:
	• New subtomogram averaging programs, and a new subtomogram alignment routine which is orders of magnitude faster than the old routine for large volumes. It is now possible to perform subtomogram averaging on thousands of 300x300x300 subtomograms on a workstation.
	• The return of the --usefilt feature from EMAN1. The new e2refine_easy option is --inputavg, and permits using one set of particles for alignment, and a separate set (perhaps with lower dose in movie-mode imaging) for reconstruction.
	• New e2refine_split program which will split a  single map reconstruction with heterogeneity reconstruction into 2 submaps, identifying the largest heterogeneity present. This program supplements full e2refinemulti heterogeneity analysis.
	• e2initialmodel_hisym for high symmetry (icos,tet,cubic) initial model generation.
	• reorganization of the workflow and addition of many previously command-line only programs
	• direct support for MRCS 4-bit PACK mode in both of its forms
	• improvements to e2refine_easy heuristics for slight improvements to reconstruction quality

Of course there is the also usual set of minor bugfixes and other changes.

One warning for Mac users. There are a number of 'issues' with running EMAN2.12 on El Capitan (OSX 10.11). These problems are more annoyances rather than things that really prevent you from doing reconstructions, and largely focus on GUI issues. As a simple example, if you use the browser to display an image, then open the control panel for the image, when you close the image, the control panel window doesn't close immediately. These are not general EMAN 2.12 bugs, but are El Capitan-specific, and may take some time to properly debug.


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Steven Ludtke, Ph.D.
Professor, Dept. of Biochemistry and Mol. Biol.                Those who do
Co-Director National Center For Macromolecular Imaging	           ARE
Baylor College of Medicine                                     The converse
sludtke at bcm.edu  -or-  stevel at alumni.caltech.edu               also applies
http://ncmi.bcm.edu/~stevel