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What is XDS, and how to obtain it?

XDS is a program package written for the "reduction" of 2-dimensional data images ("frames") obtained from crystals irradiated with monochromatic X-rays. The package mainly consists of the programs XDS (which processes a single dataset), XSCALE (for scaling of several datasets) , XDSCONV (for conversion of output file to other formats) and VIEW (for visualizing).

The author of the program is Wolfgang Kabsch (Wolfgang dot Kabsch at mpimf-heidelberg dot mpg dot 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. This is the reference for the algorithms employed in the INTEGRATE and CORRECT steps.

J. Appl. Cryst. (1993). 26, 795-800. Automatic processing of rotation diffraction data from crystals of initially unknown symmetry and cell constants. This is the reference for the IDXREF step.

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 collect 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).

To see what's there already, go to List of all pages. A good starting point is the article about XDS.INP where the keywords and parameters for running XDS are described. There is also a wishlist, and Known Bugs, and Quality Control (under construction).

Contributing to 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 can edit existing pages, and create new ones.
• Short introduction to creating an article

Wiki contents

• List of all pages - to see which pages exist already ...

• Topics as an attempt to provide a hierarchy of pages