Posts in the 3DNA forum reach 600

As of May 6, the total number of posts in the 3DNA forum has reached 600. Created in March 2007, with my debut post titled "Welcome message from Xiang-Jun Lu", the forum is now over four years old. Overall, the forum has served its purpose pretty well. In answering questions, I've been increasingly referring to the posts in the forum. As a concrete example, see the thread of a recent question "Base pair step parameters with a missing base pair".

At less than three posts (about one question) per week on average, I've not felt too much stress in supporting the forum (and maintaining 3DNA) in my spare time. For the most part, I've enjoyed interacting with 3DNA users from everywhere in the world, and with diverse backgrounds. Following the Unix philosophy ("Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together."), 3DNA has proved to be robust and flexible in serving its ever-growing user community. As a matter of fact, few questions I received a couple of years ago were beyond my original consideration of the details while I wrote the code. It is this intimated knowledge of all the underlying algorithms and every bit of their implementations that allows me to answer users' questions quickly and concretely.

As time passes by, however, it has become evident to me that 3DNA needs to be further refined and extended to meet the ever changing needs of its user community. For example, over the past few months, several questions asked in the 3DNA forum are directly relevant but clearly beyond 3DNA's current capabilities. While I'd be interested in implementing some of the requested functionality that make sense to me, doing so is certainly over my spare time limit. On the other hand, my increased understanding of nucleic acid structures and accumulated software expertise make it simply an issue of time and effort to move 3DNA to the next level, far beyond its current application scope and impact.

With posts in the 3DNA forum reaching 600, and citations to 3DNA articles over 600 (Google scholar), I am hopeful something good will happen to the 3DNA project. After all, 6 is a lucky number in traditional Chinese culture.