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ensembles of entities

herbert_bernstein (yaya@aip.org)
Mon, 11 Dec 95 21:34:37 EST 

With Paula's head's up on wanting to wrap up major changes, Frances
and I want to mention something we are working on.  There
are times when a single entity is made up of other entities
which have distinct systematic names and sources.  There are
times when distinct entities together form one chemical entity
with a single systematic name and source.  STRUCT_BIOL_GEN
provides ways to put together entities to form biological units,
but there is no parallel sub-category for ENTITY to relate
names and sources to those biological units when appropriate.

We think there may be a need for an ENTITY_ENS subcategory in
properly citing sources and such for macromolecules engineered
by assembling other macromolecules with known sources, or in
dealing with cases where the proper source citation is for
an ensemble of entities making up a complete structure rather
than for the individual chains.

We hope to have a more concrete proposal with examples which
may clarify the problem in a few more days.