Stc Background

  • Copyright Notice / References
  • User Agreement
  • Acknowledgements
  • Project History

    Copyright Notice / References

    stc Copyright (C) 1999
    Lavigne, P., J.R. Bagu, R. Boyko, L. Willard, C.F.B. Holmes and B.D. Sykes.
    Department of Biochemistry
    University of Alberta
    Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
    T6G 2H7
    pierre.lavigne@courrier.usherb.ca
    brian.sykes@ualberta.ca

    No portion of this program may be incorporated into other programs or sold for profit without express written consent of the authors.

    The reference paper which introduces the stc software: 

    	Lavigne, P., J.R. Bagu, R. Boyko, L. Willard, C.F.B. Holmes and B.D. Sykes.
	Structure-based thermodynamic analysis of the dissociation of protein
	phosphatase-1 catalytic subunit and microcystin-LR docked complexes.
	Protein Science 9:252-264 (2000).

    User Agreement

    The recipient of the stc software† package agrees to the following:

    1. Title and ownership rights to this Software and any derivatives of it remain solely with the Dept. of Biochemistry at the University of Alberta. The Software or any of its derivatives may not be sold, tendered or traded for profit by the recipient.
    2. Any results of significant scientific merit obtained through the use of this product must acknowledge the stc Software package and its authors. (See above.)

    †The term ``Software'' herein shall mean all computer programs, recompiled versions of these programs, derivative works, support material, documentation, manuals and databases pertaining to the stc package.

    Acknowledgements

    Thanks to Pascal Mercier who did an extensive test of stc 4.2 and provided many helpful suggestions. Thanks to Fred Richards and T.J.Richmond, whose accessible surface area fortran software is still used in stc. William Wilcox also did modifications on the addradii subroutine. The work of K.P. Murphy and E. Freire forms the basis for the thermodynamics programming section. Thermodynamics of structural stability and cooperative folding behavior in proteins. Adv Protein Chem. 1992;43:313-61.

    Project History

    STC was first being formulated in 1996 when John Bagu began to consider how thermodynamic analysis of the dissociation of protein phosphatase-1 catalytic subunit and microcystin-LR docked complexes could be done. Teaming up with Pierre Lavigne who had exceptional interest in structural thermodynamics, they formulated a plan which could use a number of the routines already accessed/modified in the software package vadar .

    When I (Robert) heard of these researchers' ideas I offered to write the straight forward thermodynamics section of the project. The interactive c program 'thermo" was written in a couple weeks and when combined with the accessible surface area routines, it appeared to work quite well on John's data. To finish up vadar, I then offered to write a second version which used a simple tcl interface to gather the input for thermo and display the output. With the gui, stc (which it was now called) became a magnitude easier to use.

    The microcystin paper was published in 2000. Pierre always believed the software had ramnifications which far exceeded the original purpose of the work. However, with a small user base and a grant to further develop the software being turned down, stc was in maintenance mode. Two versions followed, both were small changes. Histograms were added in version 4.

    In Nov 2003, I received two more emails regarding transition of stc to nucleic acids and Pierre happened to be visiting at this time. Somehow these events all conspired to make me promise to do something about the state of stc. Once I got started, I couldn't seem to stop as witnessed by the v5.0 release notes.

    Mar 2006: After a couple years, it was time to go through my bug list, update the documentation and add a gui for batch processing. This eventually led to version 5.3.

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    Questions to: bionmr@biochem.ualberta.ca