Every monomer in the library is either public or private. This article explains what the distinction means, why public monomers cannot be edited, and how the two layers interact when you register your own.
Two layers, one library
The Home page shows both layers in one report, and the Status column tells them apart. The Public Monomers and Private Monomers saved views filter on it.
Public monomers are the reference library that Discngine ships with the service: the natural amino acids and nucleotides, and the large set of modified residues, sugars, phosphates and linkers inherited from the Pistoia Alliance HELM monomer library. They belong to no organisation. Every organisation sees the same public monomers, so a HELM sequence written with public symbols means the same thing everywhere.
Private monomers belong to your organisation. Nobody outside your organisation can see them, and they are the only monomers you can create, edit, delete or revive.
Public monomers are read-only in every interface.
Why you cannot edit a public monomer
A public monomer is shared. If one organisation could change the structure behind A, every peptide of every other organisation would silently change with it. The reference library therefore evolves only through service releases, with the changes listed in the Release Notes.
If a public monomer is wrong for your purposes, register a private one with a different symbol. It will coexist with the public one, and your sequences choose which they use by symbol.
How private monomers relate to public ones
Private monomers are checked against the public layer at registration time:
- Symbol: a private monomer cannot reuse the symbol of a public monomer of the same polymer type. Registration fails with Cannot modify protected public monomer '…' (public seed data). Otherwise the same symbol would resolve to two different structures depending on who reads it.
- Structure: a private monomer cannot carry the canonical structure of a public one for the same polymer type. Registration fails with Monomer with this structure is already registered: …, naming the public symbol to use instead. The public monomer already represents that molecule; using it keeps your sequences comparable with everyone else's.
Within your organisation the same two rules apply between private monomers, and a bulk import treats a matching symbol as an update rather than an error. See Canonical SMILES and Duplicate Detection.
Related
- Versioning and Deletion: why a public monomer cannot be revived either.