Xds

What is XDS, and how to obtain it?

XDS is a program written for the "reduction" of 2-dimensional data images ("frames") obtained from crystals irradiated with X-rays.

The author of the program is Wolfgang Kabsch (Wolfgang.Kabsch@mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de).

The program is free for academic use, and can be downloaded from http://www.mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de/~kabsch/xds/html_doc/downloading.html .

Documentation is at http://www.mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de/~kabsch/xds .

Links to XDS papers by Wolfgang Kabsch

J. Appl. Cryst. (1988). 21, 67-72. Automatic indexing of rotation diffraction patterns.

J. Appl. Cryst. (1988). 21, 916-924. Evaluation of single-crystal X-ray diffraction data from a position-sensitive detector

J. Appl. Cryst. (1993). 26, 795-800. Automatic processing of rotation diffraction data from crystals of initially unknown symmetry and cell constants

Chapters 11.3 and 25.2.9 in International Tables for Crystallography Volume F: Crystallography of Biological Macromolecules (don't know the link to PDFs of these)

Purpose of the Wiki

The purpose of this Wiki is to provide an accurate resource for XDS users, and to provide explanations and hints for the successful use of XDS. I (Kay Diederichs) try to keep the Wiki up-to-date with XDS versions and insights. I plan to have Tips and Tricks for XDS usage, explanations of its output, and recommendations for the parameters in XDS.INP (if it appears useful to deviate from their defaults).

There is also a wishlist.

Use of the Wiki

The MediaWiki software used here works in the same way as the well-known Wikipedia. This means that anyone with a userid and password (email me, kay dot diederichs at uni-konstanz dot de, to get that) can edit existing pages, and create new ones.

To see what's there already, go to http://strucbio.biologie.uni-konstanz.de/xdswiki/index.php/Special:Allpages . A good starting point is the article about XDS.INP where the keywords and parameters for running XDS are described.