The current version of DSSP is available as a prebuilt binary for Windows and for Linux. You can download the binaries from ftp://ftp.cmbi.ru.nl/pub/software/dssp/
It is possible to get all pre-calculated DSSP files on your in-house machine. We allow you to do this with the 'rsync' command (that is UNIX/Linux, I don't know the equivalent command in other operating systems, so don't mail me for that).
Getting the DSSP files local is a two-step process:
To start your in-house database, make a directory and name it dssp, or DSSP, or myDSSP, or something else that is logical. In that directory type 'pwd' (without the quotes...). the pwd command returns the path which I will call path_to_dssp. Now type the command (obviously replacing path_to_dssp with the real path that you got from pwd):
rsync -avz rsync://rsync.cmbi.ru.nl/dssp/ /path_to_dssp/ |
If, at a later stage, for example weekly, you want to make an update of your in-house DSSP database you issue the command:
rsync -avz --delete rsync://rsync.cmbi.ru.nl/dssp/ /path_to_dssp/ |
This latter command you can, for example, have executed from a crontab job.
If your institute's firewall doesn't allow you to use the (preferred) rsync way of obtaining DSSP files, feel free to work with FTP. The files are in that case available from: ftp://ftp.cmbi.ru.nl//pub/molbio/data/dssp/
You will need to get hacker-assistance to do updates with FTP without using too much bandwidth. So please don't download everything time-and-time again.
Please do these rsync (or FTP) jobs between midnight and 8.00 am Dutch time.
The DSSP program was designed by Wolfgang Kabsch and Chris Sander to standardize secondary structure assignment. DSSP is a database of secondary structure assignments (and much more) for all protein entries in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). DSSP is also the program that calculates DSSP entries from PDB entries.
In 2011 Maarten Hekkelman has written new software that produces the same output as the original DSSP, but that deals better with the many exceptions life and the PDB throw at us. And the new software is much faster and easier to maintain in the future too.
We will distribute the DSSP source code only if you can make very clear to us that that is needed for a very wothy, scientific cause.
The source code of the original DSSP is still available (and works fine).
DSSP is distributed on a basis of trust. You send the license agreement and you download the software (either the source code of DSSP 1.0, or the executable of DSSP 2.0; whatever you want). If you are a commercial entity, the same rules hold. So, as of 'now' (July 8 2011) DSSP is free of cost for everybody.