[3dem] RELION-2.0 general beta release

[Sjors Scheres]

Dear EM-ers,

Please be advised that a beta-version of RELION-2.0 is now downloadable 
from the wiki at http://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/relion
As we've moved from our old tarball system to an open git repository on 
bitbucket, the line between a beta and stable release has become more 
diffuse. Still, after a few months of beta-testing by a group of 
experts, we think RELION-2.0 is now ready for a more general round of 
beta-testing.

The main new things compared to the previous stable (1.4) release are:

1) GPU-acceleration of 2D/3D classification and 3D auto-refinement. This 
has been done through a wonderful collaboration with the group of Erik 
Lindahl at the SciLife lab in Stockholm, in particular by his students 
Dari Kimanius and Bjorn Forsberg. This makes it possible to do cryo-EM 
structure determination in a matter of days on inexpensive desktop 
machines (as opposed to weeks on expensive clusters before). The paper 
describing this is not yet out, but we have an older version of it on 
BioRxiv: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/19/059717.

2) Processing of helical assemblies. This is work done by my student 
Shaoda He. We're writing up the paper right now, and meanwhile there is 
info on how to use it on the wiki. The first structures to have been 
solved with this method are on their way too.

3) A pipelined-approach to image processing (including a new GUI). 
RELION-2 will keep track of all your jobs, thus facilitating 
book-keeping and workflow-based automation (for example on-the-fly 
processing during data acquisition). Again, a preprint of the 
corresponding paper is on BioRxiv: 
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/29/078352

NVIDIA has kindly sent us a Titan-X GPU to be given away to the 
person/group giving the most useful feedback during beta-testing. Please 
use the bitbucket issue-reporting functionality to tell us about bugs: 
https://bitbucket.org/scheres/relion-devel-lmb/issues. Please continue 
to use the ccpem email list (and not direct emails) for user questions: 
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCPEM.

Have fun,
Sjors, Erik, Dari, Bjorn & Shaoda

-- 
Sjors Scheres
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge Biomedical Campus
Cambridge CB2 0QH, U.K.
tel: +44 (0)1223 267061
http://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/groups/scheres