IMP Manual
for IMP version 2.14.0
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We have already applied IMP to solve the structures of many novel biological systems, listed on the biological systems page. Each system on that page includes all of the files needed to reproduce the results in the accompanying publication. For example, the list includes the modeling example from earlier in this manual, as well as modeling of the Nup84 subcomplex of the Nuclear Pore Complex. Each system is periodically rerun with the latest version of IMP to make sure that it still works correctly.
To apply IMP to a new biological system, you are welcome to use one of the existing systems, such as the Nup84 model, as your template - or you can write from scratch using the basic IMP classes and/or the IMP::pmi higher level interface. In either case, we strongly recommend that you manage your application as a GitHub repository so that
We recommend the following contents for your repository (see the Nup84 repository for an example):
README.md
file describing the system and explaining how to run the protocol.LICENSE
file with the license for the data files and scripts. This doesn't need to be the same license (LGPL/GPL) that IMP uses; in fact, for data files one of the Creative Commons licenses probably makes more sense. We recommend the CC BY-SA license which allows anybody to use and modify the data under the same terms, as long as they cite the original work.test
directory containing one or more Python scripts with names starting with test
. It should be possible to run these scripts without any "special" setup (e.g. they should not require any input arguments or environment variables, or use hard-coded paths). These scripts should run as much of your modeling protocol as possible, and ideally test the results (e.g. by comparing models against 'known good' clusters). Each script should simply exit with a non-zero exit code (e.g. by raising an exception) if something failed; one easy way to do this nicely is to use Python's unittest module. The tests should run in a "reasonable" amount of time (no more than 48 hours) on a single processor. If this is not enough time to run your entire protocol, run only a representative subset (e.g. the Nup84 modeling test passes a --test
option to the modeling script, which has it perform fewer iterations of sampling).metadata
subdirectory (also contact us to let us know about it). This should contain two files:thumb.png
: a small image used to represent your system on the page.metadata.yaml
: a file in YAML format specifying (see also the Nup84 example):title
: a short descriptive name for your systemtags
: a list of tags to group your system with others that use similar methods or input datapmid
: the PubMed ID of the accompanying publicationprereqs
: a list of any non-standard packages that are needed (in addition to IMP and Python's standard library) to run the scriptsruntime
: upper limit to the time the tests will take to runbuild
: which type of IMP build to run the tests with (release
, fast
or debug
); release
is generally recommendedparallel
: if set, the tests will be run in an MPI environment, with the given number of cores available (by default, a serial environment is used)