open-bcif is a high-performance, streaming-capable toolkit for manipulating and validating BinaryCIF (BCIF) files. Designed for structural biology data at scale, it provides a "Swiss Army Knife" CLI that can handle GB-scale files efficiently without loading them entirely into memory.

• Modern Data Standards: As the PDB moves to BinaryCIF, open-bcif ensures you can handle GB-scale structural data without the memory overhead of legacy formats.
• Scientific Validation: Includes strict validation of column data types and dictionary compliance.

• Blazing Fast: Built in Rust for maximum throughput, utilizing zero-copy parsing and MessagePack optimization.
• Memory Efficient: Uses a streaming architecture that can process massive structural biological data on commodity hardware.

• Validate: Check the structural integrity and encoding of BCIF files.
• Split: Break large BCIF files into smaller chunks by DataBlock or Category.
• Merge: Combine multiple BCIF files into a single optimized stream.
• Convert: High-speed conversion between BCIF and other formats (e.g., text CIF).
• Streaming Engine: Built on a reactive streaming architecture to minimize memory footprint.

If you have Rust installed, you can install open-bcif directly from crates.io:

cargo install open-bcif

Download the latest pre-compiled binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows from the GitHub Releases page.

1. Download the binary for your platform.
2. Make it executable (Linux/macOS): chmod +x open-bcif-*
3. Move it to your PATH (e.g., /usr/local/bin).

git clone https://github.com/elkins/open-bcif.git
cd open-bcif
cargo install --path .

open-bcif validate structure.bcif

open-bcif split large_entry.bcif --output-dir ./parts

open-bcif merge part1.bcif part2.bcif --output merged.bcif

open-bcif is written in Rust for maximum performance and memory safety. It utilizes a custom streaming MessagePack parser to traverse the BCIF hierarchy (DataBlock -> Category -> Column) incrementally.

For more details, see the Documentation.

If you use open-bcif in your research, please cite it as:

@software{elkins2026openbcif,
  author = {Elkins, George},
  title = {open-bcif: High-performance streaming toolkit for BinaryCIF},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/elkins/open-bcif},
  version = {0.1.1}
}

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.