I am looking for suggestions from the CHIMERA developers

and users’ community to address a rendering problem I have.

I have computed electric field data for protein ligand binding

sites (wt and related mutants) and would like to render this

field data as a collection of vectors, superimposed over a

nice rendering of the binding site structures. The field results

are from a series of QM/MM calculations we have performed,

and are in a simple ASCII format: cartesian coordinates for

N grid points, followed by cartesian coordinates of the N

field vectors that originate from the corresponding grid

points. I’ve debated whether I might be able to subvert the

PseudoBond reader to somehow process these data, but

still don’t have an easy option to display each field vector

as a short arrow.

Note that I don’t want to render the electric field data as a

set of continuous color-coded field lines. That is easy in any

number of molecular graphics programs. I know that rendering

fields as a collection of vectors (arrows) is “old-fashioned”,

but in this case we are convinced the old-fashioned render

is a more effective way to communicate our results.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Terry L.

P.S. Greetings to all my former colleagues at UCSF.