BUSTER - Foreword

This is our first upgrade for the distributed academic version of the BUSTER refinement package since its initial release in January 2004. Numerous developments and improvements have taken place in the intervening period, which have been the subject of progress reports at many meetings and have been quoted in publications where they were used in academic collaborations. The bulk of this work has been supported by the Global Phasing Consortium of pharmaceutical companies, with supplementary funding from the VIZIER FP6 project of the European Commission (Contract no. LSHG-CT-2004-511960). Only these two groups, and a few close academic collaborators, have had access to the successive versions of BUSTER as they became available. However, in June 2009, the Consortium members agreed that the general academic community could have access to the same version of the software as them, and at the same time.

In response to the sustained demand for BUSTER from academic users, and in the light of its demonstrated usefulness in dealing with a range of difficult structure completion and refinement problems encountered on collaborative projects, we have decided to bite the bullet and to make the Toronto ACA meeting (25-30 July 2009) the watershed event for releasing the current version of BUSTER, as it will be the subject of two talks in the Refinement Session 06.09 on Tuesday 28th.

After many years during which the constant need to press ahead with new developments precluded spending any time on the revisions or reorganisations of the documentation that would have been necessary to keep it up to date for general academic distribution, and as the previous situation created a further disincentive to document for academic users versions of the software we had been working hard to supersede, we are acutely aware that the current state of the documentation is suboptimal. We are however releasing it as is, warts and all: our rationale is that access to the program may bring immediate benefits to those who will find their way to its successful use in its present state; whereas waiting until we produce the perfect documentation would deny those benefits to everybody for a further period of time.

To help users as much as possible, we have provided a Quickstart Guide to give an overall description of the capabilities and organisation of the software. The documentation still contains a few out-of-date or deprecated parts, that are marked out in a suitably placed roadmap.

The use of BUSTER should be referenced as follows:

  Bricogne G, Blanc E, Brandl M, Flensburg C, Keller P, Paciorek W,
  Roversi P, Smart OS, Vonrhein C and Womack, TO (2009) BUSTER,
  version 2.8.0. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Global Phasing Ltd.

All feedback that will help us improve this distribution in any way will be gratefully received and keenly appreciated.

Last modified: 05.02.2010