Ann Mullin wrote:

Hello,

I am wondering how to adjust the ribbons of nucleic acids so that they follow the path of the phosphates or the sugars, anything but the averaged path they have now. I want to show the backbone as a ribbon with bases projecting out, but now some bases float about the backbone.

Thanks for any help. Ann

I just modified Chimera to accept user-defined "ribbon residue classes", which specify the ribbon-guiding atoms (currently we use C5' for nucleic acids). Unfortunately, the changes had to be made at the C++ level, which means you would need a complete new distribution. We plan to have a new snapshot release in a few weeks, but if you'd like to try it out sooner, we can try to arrange something. (You'll need the new Chimera and a script for creating "ribbon residue classes" for now, but we may have an extension for manipulating these classes in the future.) Conrad