ndruns and nstruct in fixbb

I’m not too familiar with the fixbb protocol, but in general the nstruct parameter is used to control the number of times you run the full protocol on the input structure. That is, a run with -nstruct 10 is (almost) functionally equivalent of running the program twice with -nstruct 5 each time, or ten times with -nstruct 1. (The “almost” comes in because there is better handling of file naming and resource conflicts if you do it in a single run versus multiple runs – but that’s about the only difference.)

If you get one output structure with the default -nstruct of 1, in general you should get ten output structures with -nstruct 10, fifty with -nstruct 50, etc. Because of the way the internal job handling is done (each job is handled independently of the rest), if you want to filter decoys based on the parameters of the entire run (e.g. “best scoring”) rather than absolute metrics (e.g. total energy less than X) you need to do it in two steps – one run to generate all the structures, and then a second run to do the population metric-based filtering.

Wow, great question! (I wish Rocco hadn’t beaten me to it, it took me 2 hours to finish typing this simple answer due to interruptions…)

In Rosetta++, nothing was well centralized. ndruns did sort of the same thing as nstruct, but for different sorts of operations (design/packing versus relax/abinitio/docking).

In 3.x, we made it so that Rosetta always uses nstruct for “number of structures to output”. So, fixbb takes nstruct, and nstruct has replaced ndruns for “output this many structures”. However, ndruns still has its meaning of “do X jobs, and only return the best 1”. So if you do:

fixbb -nstruct 10

You’ll get 10 results

fixbb -ndruns 10

You’ll get 1 result, but Rosetta will run 10 trajectories and only return the best one.

ndruns is strictly faster than nstruct for a given amount of work, because some score calculations (rotamers and rotamer pair energies) are shared between independent packing trajectories using ndruns. So, -ndruns 10 will take less time than -nstruct 10. However, -ndruns only affects things that run through PackRotamersMover, and only at the level of PackRotamersMover. fixbb is just a wrapper around PackRotamersMover so it, it works immediately as expected.

For other things that use PackRotamersMover (which is generally any thing that does packing), ndruns will still work. If you pass -ndruns 10, every time it packs, it will pack 10 times and return the best. This can add a lot of time to a trajectory, as it occurs each time PackRotamersMover runs, so be careful.

“Thank you very much for the clear answer! “

You finally asked one where I know *exactly* how it works.