Hi everybody, There is another set of possibilities I neglected to mention. These simply categorize residues into discrete sets which could be colored differently, as opposed to coloring continuously over a numerical range. There are amino acid categories that can be specified with "Select... Residue... amino acid category... [category-name]" where category- name is hydrophobic, positive, negative, etc. These names could also be used in the command line, e.g.: color blue positive color red negative We took the default categorizations from a paper, http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/aacat.html but you can change which residues are in which category as well as create entirely new categories with the ResProp tool. The new categories will show up in the menu and can be used in the command line too. http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/resprop/ resprop.html A similar approach is to use the "alias" command, for example: alias myres :phe,tyr,leu col hot pink myres alias thezone ligand z<4 rep stick thezone Aliasing can use any type of specification and is not limited to amino acids like ResProp. To color by some continuous numerical property, however, attributes would definitely be the way to go. Best, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. meng@cgl.ucsf.edu UCSF Computer Graphics Lab and Babbitt Lab Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/meng/index.html