Who are we

WHAT IF is more than a computer program; it is a vision. Over the years many people have worked on WHAT IF. They now all have their own little corner in WHAT IF. And they are responsible for that private corner. Most people who ever worked on WHAT IF are still working on it occasionally, or help by ansering questions.

WHAT IF can use several other packages. WHAT IF only interfaces to products that are cheap, or free for academic users, adhere to our quality standards, and have a reasonable chance of longevity. Some of these products are: DSSP, GROMACS, GRID, CONCOORD, DELPHI, PRODRUG, PDBFINDER, HSSP, YASARA, and JMOL. These products will be properly acknowledged at the appropriate location in this writeup suite.

The WHAT IF writeup lists most people who ever contributed to WHAT IF, and lists their contributions. Some people who are still important to the project today (or were important very recently) will be listed below. First the people who today still work on (a part of) WHAT IF:

These days, WHAT IF is maintained by the Vriend group of the CMBI.

A picture of Gert
Gert Vriend
E-mail Address:
_vriend @.cmbi.umcn.nl_
Visiting Address:
CMBI
NCMLS, UMC
Geert Grooteplein 26-28
6525 GA NIJMEGEN
The Netherlands
Phone Number:
+31 24 3619521
Fax Number:
+31 24 3619395
"Nothing is impossible
for a man who doesn't
have to do it himself."

Elmar Krieger is the author of Yasara. He worked with me as a PhD student in the period 2000-2004. Elmar is today still maintaining a series of the WHAT IF associated databases and programs. For example, he updated DSSP to 21-st century standards, he maintains the PDBFINDER, and the DSSP and HSSP databases. Look under the TwinSet to see why I, the author of WHAT IF, like Yasara so much.

Daan van Aalten worked with me as an undergrad student in the early 90's. Later I was partly involved in the supervision of his PhD project. While in my group Daan worked on ProDrug (in those days still called DavaBug :-), and he kept working on it ever since. ProDrug interprets the small molecules for WHAT IF.
Commercial users will have to request a license for PRODRUG. As with other software, like DSSP or GRID, WHAT IF will work fine without this associated software, but it will work better with it.

Bert de Groot is the author of CONCOORD. Concoord comes with WHAT IF. This software is available in a stand-alone version too.
We collaborate with Bert on a series of projects that directly or indirectly are of benefit to WHAT IF.

Rolando Rodriguez is the genius behind the OpenGL graphics in WHAT IF (and a few other things). He worked at the CIGB when these parts of software were written. Although that institute is listed at their 50 pesos bill: they are not allowed to print their own money. The OpenGL part is also freely available to all our friends in the USA :-).
Rolando changed job in 2009 and we hope to soon revive the collaboration with him.

Jürgen Haas is nowadays taking over the Olga maintenance and further development from Ollie. Jürgen uses Olga a lot, and he can help you with this interface. As by now more lines in this software are Jürgen's than Ollie's, Jürgen renamed it to WHAG.

Other contributors of WHAT IF code

Many other people have contributed to WHAT IF. In the section below, I try to collect pictures of those people who have contributed code that today still is being used. This list is not complete because Google is good, but not that good. If you are missing in this table, send me a picture and the reason why you should be listed...

Olivier (Ollie) Lange wrote the Olga interface to GROMACS while being a PhD student in the group of Helmut Grubmüller at the MPI in Göttingen. Obviously, I thank Helmut for allowing Ollie to do this.

DSSP was written by (Kabsch and) Sander: Chris Chris Sander's web-page occasionally changes. Google him at mskcc if his picture is a dead link
DSSP was written by Kabsch (and Sander): Wolfgang I think the elusive Wolfgang Kabsch is the person to the right on this picture.
Rob Hooft's contribution to WHAT IF has been extensively mentioned throughout these web pages. His main contribution has been WHAT_CHECK, which is the check menu inside WHAT IF. Rob Rob Hooft

WHAT IF wasn't written overnight, and wasn't written just by me. Many people have contributed. Some people contributed code, others tested the software. Some people are still today working on it. It is absolutely unthinkable that these acknowledgements are complete. As with every big project like this, documentation is done Friday afternoon shortly before somebody gets the beers from the fridge... If you think I missed you, mail me, and the next release will see proper acknowledgements.

The acknowledgements are Chapter 98 of the writeup.