What is mmCIF ?
mmCIF stands for 'macro-molecular Crystallographic Information
File'. This format was developed by the PDB consortium and the
International Union of Crystallography (IUCr), based on
Crystallographic Information File (CIF), a format used for describing
the structures of small molecules.
mmCIF became the recommended format for the exchange of
biomacromolecular structures in 2014.
mmCIF and Jalview
Since Jalview 2.10, mmCIF
is used for structures downloaded from the PDB. This means:
- Jalview can use the mmCIF to read structures that are too
large to be represented by a single PDB file. (ie, with more than
>62 chains and/or 99999 ATOM records).
- Jalview users will have access to the richer annotation
provided by PDBx/mmCIF files.
- There may be slight differences between sequences
containing modified residues for structures downloaded in mmCIF
format. This is because mmCIF differs from the PDB format in the
way it describes non-standard sequence data.
Support for importing 3D structure data from flat file and
EMBL-PDBe as mmCIF was added in Jalview 2.10