Hi Steve, ChimeraX does not have the thermal ellipsoids option currently. However, in ChimeraX you can open your small-molecule CIF and then save it as PDB, e.g. ChimeraX commands: open 1853486.cif format corecif save 1853486.pdb (the filenames could be pathnames if not in the default location, e.g. ~/Desktop/ on Mac) The PDB file contains the ANISOU records needed for thermal ellipsoid display in Chimera. You can open it in Chimera and use menu: Tools... Structure Analysis... Thermal Ellipsoids. In my tests of this process, I had to increase the scale factor (e.g. to 2.5) because with scale factor 1 they were too small to protrude from the sticks. See attached image. I hope this helps, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. UCSF Chimera(X) team Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco
On Apr 25, 2023, at 9:12 AM, Eric Pettersen via Chimera-users <chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Hi Steven, Chimera cannot handle small-molecule CIF files, only macromolecular CIF (mmCIF) files. You could try our ChimeraX program (in particular the 1.6 release candidate) which can handle many small-molecule CIFs. https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimerax/
--Eric
Eric Pettersen UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
On Apr 25, 2023, at 6:25 AM, Steven Frey via Chimera-users <chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Dear Chimera Team,
I’m unable to open the CIF file for a structure that we had done in 2018 and am getting the error shown on the attached jpeg. I am also attaching the CIF file downloaded from CCSD which comes from our original paper:
Steven T. Frey, Hillary A. Ramirez*, Manpreet Kauer, and Jerry P. Jasinski. “Crystal structure of a seven-coordinate manganese(II) complex with tris(pyridin-2-ylmethyl)amine (TMPA),” Acta Crystallographica, 2018, E74, 1075-1078. https://doi.org/10.1107/S2056989018009611.
I’d like to be able to open the file in Chimera so that I can produce an ORTEP drawing for another paper. Can you help me figure out what the problem is?
Thanks, Steve Frey
