the Product Release Document for Discovery Studio 2020 lists over sixty fixed defects and almost as many enhancements.
Amidst the highlights like MSLD, explicit membrane modelling and new property predictors for proteins, it is easy to miss some of the less glamorous tasks that, nevertheless, contribute significantly to continuously improving the user experience with DS.
My current favourite is DSC-29882. Little sounds more boring than a database update, but a recent case reminded me how small steps can have big effects and how quickly one starts taking comfort for granted.
In DS 2020, the RCSB Structure Search protocol can recognise almost 30'000 structures. This is important, because some formats, like .pdb files, do not encode the bond order for non-standard residues. When you load such a file into the DS Client, it will automatically try to assign the correct bond orders even to unknown fragments; and thanks to DSC-30666 this step has become even faster in the latest version. You should still check your ligands, but it gets them right most of the time.
With other programs this may need to be done entirely manually, or you end up with unexpected results. In the case I mentioned, a triazole was properly recognised by DS, but treated as a tetrahydro-triazole when the file was read by some other software – not quite the same thing …
This also reminds us that one wants to chose the file format carefully, when passing data between different programs, in order to avoid loss of important information.
And what is your personal favourite in Discovery Studio 2020 ?