- Chimera-users - RBVI Mailing Lists

Selecting Protein portions
by Reiner Villavicencio 20 Nov '05

20 Nov '05

Dear all, I have read a couple of literature which uses the Chimera program. Before performing a docking run, most of them selects only the relevant residues within a certain region (for example in a 20 angstrom core). May I ask how is this done in Chimera? I mean do the "unrelevant" portions get deleted? Thank you and good day - RV "Its hard to hold on to something that can never be yours in anyway you want... something that wasnt really yours to begin with... you just have to go on and accept the fact that while good things never last some dont even start...." Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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creating cubes and other 3D shapes
by Stephen A. Smith 18 Nov '05

18 Nov '05

Hi I want to create a cube (box; 1Å^3, 2Å^3, etc.) at specific grid points and color them as needed. Is this possible in Chimera? It is easy to do with spheres by specifying an atom at the desired location and then defining its VDW radius. I would like to create cubes and rectangles of various sizes, related to regions of my protein, to denote specific atomic / residue features. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Steve __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com

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Reference Manual
by Reiner Villavicencio 17 Nov '05

17 Nov '05

Dear all, Is an offline reference manual (*.pdf) available for Chimera? I realized that under the documentation section of the website, that only online references are present. Having an offline user guide would be more convenient because there is no need to go online everytime a problem is encountered. Thank you and good day Reiner Villavicencio BS Biochemistry Dept. of Physical Sciences and Mathematics College of Arts and Sciences University of the Philippines, Manila "Its hard to hold on to something that can never be yours in anyway you want... something that wasnt really yours to begin with... you just have to go on and accept the fact that while good things never last some dont even start...." Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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Reference Manual
by Reiner Villavicencio 16 Nov '05

16 Nov '05

Dear all, Is an offline reference manual (*.pdf) available for Chimera? It woulb be more convenient, because its hard to go online whenever you have a problem. Thank you and good day Reiner Villavicencio BS Biochemistry Dept. of Physical Science and Mathematics College of Arts and Sciences University of the Philippines, Manila "Its hard to hold on to something that can never be yours in anyway you want... something that wasnt really yours to begin with... you just have to go on and accept the fact that while good things never last some dont even start...." Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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export tiff...
by Panizzi, Peter 14 Nov '05

14 Nov '05

To whom it may concern, I have been using the chimera program and I cannot save or export a tiff or jpeg file is there some trick to doing this? Thanks, Pete

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Rotation callback
by Charlie Moad 11 Nov '05

11 Nov '05

Is it possible to register a python callback for when a protein is rotated and get the rotation information? Thanks, Charlie

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v1.2184 - Is it possible to specify the color of the tube object (sugar-backbone) bond in nucleic acid models?
by Sabuj Pattanayek 11 Nov '05

11 Nov '05

Hi, In v1.2184 is it possible to specify the color of the tube object connecting the sugar to the backbone in a nucleic acid model? Currently clicking apply in the nucleic acid depiction dialog changes its color to whatever the color of the base is set to. Thanks

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chimera question
by cjamesgrant＠earthlink.net 09 Nov '05

09 Nov '05

Does chimera have the capability of automatically connecting the elements of a protein to reveal its overall shape. I am trying to determine the amino acid sequence of the attached protein, but I am having a hard time visualizing how the elements are connected to each other. I am new to this program, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, C Grant

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Mac OS X 10.4.3 update breaks Chimera
by Eric Pettersen 03 Nov '05

03 Nov '05

Hi, The 10.4.3 update to OS X breaks a significant amount of Chimera functionality. Attempts to use that functionality cause Chimera to exit. In particular, for structures that contain residues other than the standard amino/nucleic acids or water, anything that directly or indirectly makes Chimera determine atom types will cause the failure. Such things include adding hydrogens, finding hydrogen bonds, and going into ball-and-stick or sphere representation (the atom sizes are based on atom types) -- though stick-only mode is okay. We are working on a fix. Until we have one, you will have to weigh the improvements offered by 10.4.3 against the loss of Chimera functionality. I'll send mail to the list as soon as there are developments. --Eric Eric Pettersen UCSF Computer Graphics Lab pett(a)cgl.ucsf.edu http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu

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RGB->CMYK color conversion
by James Puckett 02 Nov '05

02 Nov '05

Dear Chimera users, I am writing to see if there are suggested methods for ensuring good color conversion of rendered Chimera images from RGB to CMYK in Photoshop (or other image editing programs). When printing to a Tektronix Phaser 740 color laser, I am getting poor correlation between screen colorings and the printed ones. I have heard that the CMYK color space is basically a subset of the RGB color space. If this is actually the case, is there a recommended way to pick RGB colors that are relatively "safe" for conversion to a CMYK color space? Thanks, Jim Puckett

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2D labels not saved ?
by Boaz Shaanan 02 Nov '05

02 Nov '05

Hi, I used the 2D labels utility to make a few labels but when I save the image as tif I don't see them when I re-open the tif file. Is that possible ? Thanks, Boaz

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chimera and STRAP ?
by Dr. Christoph Gille 01 Nov '05

01 Nov '05

Hi, I contact you because users of the program STRAP for protein structures and sequences asked whether Chimera could be used within STRAP for visualization. Currently Jmol and Pymol are used for visualiziation. For example the results of 3D superpositions and the location of mutations can be viewed. But some users apparently prefere Chimera. My question is whether Chimera could be linked to STRAP as well. The most important point is, what mode of interprocess commmunication exists in Chimera. For example Pymol and STRAP are linked via the stdin/stdout streams. STRAP can send commands to Pymol and is notified when atoms are picked. STRAP uses the scripting language of Pymol to load proteins, create selections and rotate proteins. Could all this be done with Chimera in a similar way ? Best regards Christoph

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how to select multiple residues in multiple chains
by Eric Gillitzer 01 Nov '05

01 Nov '05

I work a lot with symmetrical, multi subunit structures and in order to select say residue 45 in every subunit, I must one at a time go in and in the sequence finder select the residue in each chain and then color it. Is there a way to select all of the same number residues (say number 45, might be an alanine) in the structure displayed and color only those. If you select alanine, it will select every single alanine in the structure. Chimera seems to be a really powerful program, but I am pulling my hair out trying to get it to do something productive in a timely fashion. thanks, eric.

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Display of qpack color output
by Eric Dawson 01 Nov '05

01 Nov '05

In the older UCSF MidasPlus incarnation of your software, there was a feature that allowed an interface with Gregort & Cohen's QPACK software for coloring according to molecular packing density using a sphere growth method. Per residue packing scores were applied with a color range after running qpack with the special option, '-m'. http://www.cmpharm.ucsf.edu/cohen/software/pages/qpack.html In the primary literature report of QPACK, it was suggested by the authors that they would work to make this feature available in UCSF MidasPlus and 'its successors'. Since this is a very fast and convenient way to evaluate the quality of models, I would like to recommend/request that this feature be enabled (or added) to Chimera. In MidasPlus, it was a command line option. The user simply entered qpack; there was a .midasrc file that contained the explicit local path to the qpack binary as well as a command line script to launch the package with the '-m' option. Thanks for your consideration of this suggestion. Best regards, Eric ______________________________________________________________________ Eric S. Dawson, Ph.D. CSB Computation, Education & Outreach Research Instructor, Biochemistry Center for Structural Biology (CSB) 5137 MRBIII Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37232-8755 Tel: (615)-936-5579 (MRB III) Tel: (615)-322-3303 (5119 SC) Fax: (615)-936-2211 "All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost." J.R.R. Tolkien - Fellowship of the Ring

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installing v1.2183 on XP & preserving preferences from previous version
by Boaz Shaanan 01 Nov '05

01 Nov '05

Hi, For some reason I had problems installin 1.2183 under XP which I haven't had before. Only after un-installing the previous version it finally worked. Maybe something with the un-install script isn't quite working properly this time around ? I thought that by saving the preferences file and copying it back to the proper location (as it says under preferences/preferences) after installation, I would be able to continue with the same prerefences setting I had before. Apparently this didn't work. So what should I do in order to properly move the preference file from one version to the other ? Thanks for your help. Boaz

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Re: [Chimera-users] Chimera and secondary structure annotations
by Thomas Goddard 28 Oct '05

28 Oct '05

Hi Julio, The secondary structure calculation requires all peptide backbone atoms. In the Chimera docs it notes: "Ksdssp uses the coordinates of the backbone atoms (N, CA, C, O, and optionally H) of a protein to determine which residues are in alpha helices and beta strands." There is no way in Chimera to determine secondary structure from just CA positions. The error message you sent for pdb2mrc is a bug in the AIRS package which is developed and maintained by Matt Baker (mbaker(a)bcm.tmc.edu) at Baylor College of Medicine, not our group. It is a problem in file C:\Programme\EMAN\chimeraext\Airs\airsIO.py It occurs because you have a model open in Chimera which is neither a density map surface nor a PDB model (maybe a molecular surface or a solid volume rendering?). The airsIO.py code does not handle that correctly. You could try running it with only the PDB model open in Chimera to avoid this problem. Alternatively you could edit the airsIO.py file with a text editor changing near line 32 from: if str(model.__class__)=="VolumeViewer.surface.Surface_Model": path=str(volume_data_set(model).data.path) elif str(model.__class__)=="chimera.Molecule": modelfile=model.openedAs path=str(modelfile[0]) if filecheck.strip()==path: path=os.path.abspath(model.name) to if str(model.__class__)=="VolumeViewer.surface.Surface_Model": path=str(volume_data_set(model).data.path) elif str(model.__class__)=="chimera.Molecule": modelfile=model.openedAs path=str(modelfile[0]) else: path = "" if filecheck.strip()==path: path=os.path.abspath(model.name) Just two lines are added the "else:" and the "path = ""'. Make sure to use this indentation if you make the change since that is important in Python code. I'll send the error message to Matt Baker. Tom > Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 01:58:48 +0200 > From: "Dr .Julio Ortiz" <ortiz(a)biochem.mpg.de> > To: Thomas Goddard <goddard(a)cgl.ucsf.edu> > Cc: meng(a)cgl.ucsf.edu > Subject: Re: Chimera and secondary structure annotations > > Dear Thomas and Elaine: > Thank you very much for your answers, I checked the ksdssp command and it works > for some pdbs, but not for those that I mentioned with the ribosomes. I think > that the problem is that some pdbs from ribosomes (like 1GIX and 1GIY) do not > have complete residues (just CAs). In the case of your images, you have use > 1PNS and 1PNU, and only those proteins in the 30S are complete. > I guess I need to contact some of the authors of the structures to see if the > complete coordinates are available. > > Another question: I installed the new version of Chimera and when using pdb2mrc > I received an error message: > ------------------------------ > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "C:\Programme\Chimera\share\__main__.py", line 59, in ? > value = chimeraInit.init(sys.argv) > File "C:\Programme\Chimera\share\chimeraInit.py", line 308, in init > tkgui.eventLoop() > File "C:\Programme\Chimera\share\chimera\tkgui.py", line 2725, in eventLoop > app.mainloop() > File "C:\Programme\Chimera\bin\Lib\lib-tk\Tkinter.py", line 965, in mainloop > self.tk.mainloop(n) > File "C:\Programme\Chimera\bin\Lib\site-packages\Pmw\Pmw_1_2\lib\PmwBase.py", > line 1751, in __call__ > _reporterror(self.func, args) > File "C:\Programme\Chimera\bin\Lib\site-packages\Pmw\Pmw_1_2\lib\PmwBase.py", > line 1814, in _reporterror > displayerror(msg) > File "C:\Programme\Chimera\bin\Lib\site-packages\Pmw\Pmw_1_2\lib\PmwBase.py", > line 1377, in displayerror > _errorReportFile.write(text + '\n') > File "C:\Programme\Chimera\bin\Lib\site-packages\Pmw\Pmw_1_2\lib\PmwBase.py", > line 1747, in __call__ > return apply(self.func, args) > File "C:\Programme\Chimera\share\chimera\baseDialog.py", line 229, in <lambda> > self.__buttonFuncName(txt))() > File "C:\Programme\EMAN\chimeraext\Airs\pdb2mrc.py", line 73, in Apply > targetPath=airsIO.getPath(target) > File "C:\Programme\EMAN\chimeraext\Airs\airsIO.py", line 32, in getPath > if filecheck.strip()==path: > UnboundLocalError: local variable 'path' referenced before assignment > > > ------------------------- > > I have already added the path of the EMAN in the tool menu. Could you tell me > what I am missing? > > > Thanks you very much, > Julio > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > This message was sent using https://webmail.biochem.mpg.de > If you encounter any problems please report to rz-linux(a)biochem.mpg.de >

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Re: [Chimera-users] Chimera and secondary structure annotations
by Thomas Goddard 28 Oct '05

28 Oct '05

Hi Julio, The "ksdssp" command in Chimera will compute secondary structure for proteins. This uses the Kabsch and Sander algorithm. As far as I know you do not need any secondary structure info for the ribosomal RNA to make a nice ribbon. To use this command use Chimera menu entry Favorites / Command Line and then type ksdssp in the command entry at the bottom of the Chimera window. More details are in the Chimera manual: http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/ksdssp.html Here are some ribosome pictures I made with Chimera a few months ago. http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/complexes05/bakeoff-talk.html Tom > Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:21:44 +0200 > From: "Dr .Julio Ortiz" <ortiz(a)biochem.mpg.de> > To: Thomas Goddard <goddard(a)cgl.ucsf.edu> > Subject: Chimera and secondary structure annotations > > Hi Thomas: > It is time for a couple of new questions about Chimera. > I am trying to generate some nice representations of the 70S ribosome showing > its proteins as ribbons, but the PDBs do not have annotations of secondary > structure. In many papers that I have seen the people use the program "Ribbons" > and a collegue suggested me also "DSSP" to generate the annotations and > visualize the results in "PyMOL". I am still fighting with some installation > problems, so I have not succeed yet in my original goal. > > The question for you is if Chimera, or some assotiated tool can generate the > annotations for secondary structure from a PDB file. In particular, do you have > some suggestions for the ribosome structures (large file with also RNA?). > > Thanks, > Julio > > > > -- > Max-Planck Institut für Biochemie > Abteilung Molekulare Strukturbiologie > Am Klopferspitz 18 > D-82152 Martinsried > Germany > Tel: +49 (89) 8578 2032 > fax: +49 (89) 8578 2641 > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > This message was sent using https://webmail.biochem.mpg.de > If you encounter any problems please report to rz-linux(a)biochem.mpg.de

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list index out of range
by Paula Petrone 25 Oct '05

25 Oct '05

Hi, I am trying to load in an MD-ensemble, using a pdb and an X-plor file .dcd. For some reason, it gives me "IndexError: list index out of range". I generated the .dcd file myself (with Fortran). VMD program seems to have no problem with it. Is it a format problem? Is it a bug? Any suggestion? Thanks a lot! (I attach the files) paula

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Error when making Covalent bonds
by David Chenoweth 25 Oct '05

25 Oct '05

Hi! I am trying to pull up two molecules in chimera and link them by forming a covalent bond between a N and C atom. I am selecting only the N of one molecule and the C of the other. When I go to command line and use the bond sel command I get the following error message. Type error: Cannot form covalent bond joining two molecules. Does anyone know how to get around this. Thanks, David C.

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Benchmarks
by Mingfeng Yang 24 Oct '05

24 Oct '05

Just realized there must be some benchmarks on chimera's webpages, and I found them. :) Glad to provide the benchmarks from my systems. Benchmark 1: Computer: IBM T41 Graphics Card: ATI Radeon mobility M7 (32M?, not 100% sure) CPU: pentium-m 1.4GHz System Memory: 512M OS: Ubuntu GNU/LINUX 5.10 Driver for video card: the built-in open-source radeon driver from Xorg-x11 6.8.2 Chimera: version 1 build 2176 Benchmark scores: surface 147 mesh 127 contour 133 solid 128 recolor 68 Benchmark 2: Computer: HP XW5500 workstation Graphics Card: ATI FireGL 8800 (128M memory) CPU: pentium-4 2.4GHz System Memory: 512M OS: Gentoo GNU/LINUX Driver for video card: ATI fglrx driver 8.14.30 Chimera: version 1 build 2176 Benchmark score: surface 234 mesh 227 contour 142 solid 256 recolor 107 Something is confusing me. As you see that scores from benchmark 2 are higher than scores from benchmark 1. But in case that I want to save a protein structure as a png file, the rendering in system 1 is nearly two times faster. How can this happen? Best, Mingfeng Yang

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preferences file
by Boaz Shaanan 22 Oct '05

22 Oct '05

Hi, After upgrading to a new version, is it advisable to use a preferences file from the previous version (which is set up to turn on all sorts of things tuned to my liking) with the new one or are there possible issues of versions incompatibility which should rather be avoided ? I'd appreciate your advice. Thanks, Boaz Boaz Shaanan, Ph.D. Associate Professor Dept. of Life Sciences Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Beer-Sheva 84105 Israel Phone:972-8-647-2220 Fax: 972-8-647-2992 972-8-646-1710 E-mail:bshaanan@bgu.ac.il

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1.2180 on Windows
by Eric Pettersen 20 Oct '05

20 Oct '05

We are now aware that the 1.2180 release still doesn't work on some people's XP installations -- so don't rush out to try it! Seems fine on non-Windows platforms. I'll post something when I think we have a fixed version. Eric Pettersen UCSF Computer Graphics Lab pett(a)cgl.ucsf.edu http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu

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Bug?
by Mingfeng Yang 19 Oct '05

19 Oct '05

Chimera version 1 build 2176, 1. start chimera, load in a protein 2. from help-->user guide, open firefox webbrowser to read help information 3. chimera main window becomes dead (black screen, not respond to mouse click and keyboard.) 4. close firefox browser, chimera goes back to normal OS: Gentoo linux, kernel-2.6.10 Firefox: version 1.07, build from gcc-3.4.4

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exporting ribbon models to vrml
by Doug Huff 18 Oct '05

18 Oct '05

Hello I work at Arkitek studios. We create rendered 3D for the science and technology crowd. I am a animator and have been charged with creating a rendering of a ribbon model in 3DS max (our software package). Your Chimera program displays the type of geometry I need and I can import vrml into my application. I can't seem to find the method to export ribbon models to vrml. When I use the multiscale models tools I always wind up with a surface model. Please remember I am not a scientist :) Thanks in advance for your help. Doug Huff 206 286 0337 http://www.arkitek.com

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ATI-Driver & Chimera hangs OS
by Mingfeng Yang 16 Oct '05

16 Oct '05

I am using Chimera build version 1 build 2176 on my Gentoo Linux platform, with ati firegl 8700 graphic card. After I upgraded the ati-drivers from 8.14.13 to 8.16.20, chimera will hang the whole system, everything dead, including the keyboard. I can only see the chimera window frame (the border), nothing else. What could be the problem? Thanks. Yang

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