History

ARIA started to be developed by François-Regis Chalaoux, Dinu Gherman, Jens Linge, Michael Nilges and Sean O'Donoghue during the mid 90's, in the team of Michael Nilges at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg). The version 1.2 of ARIA, which is directly issued from this starting point, was a set of python scripts used to set-up, launch and analyse NMR structure calculation with CNS.

Since 2001, ARIA has been developed inside the BIS (Bioinformatique Structurale) team, located at the Institut Pasteur, in Paris. Between 2002 und 2004, most of ARIA has been completely redesigned and rewritten by Michael Habeck and Wolfgang Rieping using the object-oriented programming language Python. A new Graphical User Interface, based on TkInter and Tix libraries, was introduced. This version 2.0a of ARIA also made use of the Python Numeric extensions.

The partial support of the CCPN data model provided by version 2.0 was extended to include a full support of the CCPN data model, and additional graphics facilities, as an interactive contact map to analyze the NOE assignment stage at any step of the calculation. These extensions were implemented by Benjamin Bardiaux, Michael Habeck and Wolfgang Rieping. This version 2.1 of ARIA has been released in December 2006.

The calculation of dimers (symetric homodimers and heterodimers), which had been available in some versions of ARIA 1.2, was reintroduced into the python-based ARIA. Also the spin-diffusion correction (Linge et al, 2004),  is now coded in the python scripts. A version of the network anchoring (Herrmann et al, 2002), adapted to the ARIA philosophy, was also implemented. These new functionnalities are developed by Benjamin Bardiaux, with the help of Thérèse Malliavin. The version 2.2 of ARIA including these new developments, is scheduled for the beginning of 2007.

The functionnalities currently being developed in ARIA concern the log-normal potential (Rieping et al, 2005), which is under the responsability of Aymeric Bernard, the introduction of the ssNMR functionalities,  the possibility of running other structure determination engines (CYANA, XPLOR-NIH) from ARIA, and further development of support for the determination of symmetric multimers.