EMAN Release Notes (1.4)

Welcome to EMAN 1.4. I'd strongly encourage you to take a look at the release notes for this version before proceeding. Remember the full online help for EMAN is always available by pressing the "HELP" button in eman.

EMAN 1.4 contains a significant number of new refinement options, several of which may have a substantial impact on reconstruction resolution. This does not invalidate previous results, it simply means you may be able to take a data set that previously stopped at 11 A resolution, and achieve 9 or 10 A resolution with careful application of the new options. We have tried to update the tutorial documentation to take the new options into account to some extent, but it is likely to require some trial and error to achieve optimal results for any specific project.

In addition to the new options, the full lecture notes and most of the videotaped lectures from the EMAN workshop held in Dec 2002 are now available online at:
http://ncmi.bcm.tmc.edu/ncmi/events/workshops/workshops_19

EMAN is now entering a transition period. While this release is quite similar to the previous release, we are now in the midst of a major EMAN library overhaul. The new EMAN library will be much more modular, with the goal of making it more accessible to programmer/users out there. The next version will have much improved Python scripting, and the library will be written such that it should be extremely easy for end users familiar with C++ to add new filters, alignment routines, comparison metrics, etc. This new version will be dubbed EMAN 2.0 and should be released towards the end of this year. Our hope is that this new EMAN release will embody more of the true 'open source' nature of EMAN, and will allow others to develop new algorithms and techniques within a robust (and free) platform. We will, of course, attempt to maintain as much backward compatibility with EMAN 1.4 as possible.

Here's a list of the major changes in this version:

As always, comments, suggestions and questions are always welcome. Just email sludtke@bcm.tmc.edu.

Good luck, and enjoy EMAN !


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Steven Ludtke, PhD             |        Baylor College of Medicine
sludtke@bcm.tmc.edu            |              Co-Director
stevel@alumni.caltech.edu      | National Center For Macromolecular Imaging
V: (713)798-6989               |    Dept of Biochemistry and Mol. Biol.
instant messenger: sludtke42   |           * Those who do ARE *
http://ncmi.bcm.tmc.edu/~stevel |         The converse also holds