January 2020 - ChimeraX-users - RBVI Mailing Lists

An error opening chimerax seesion
by Yehuda Halfon 11 Mar '26

11 Mar '26

Hi all, I'm using chimeraX 0.8 (2018-12-17) on centos 7 (can't remember the build). Sometimes when I load a session that was saved using this version of chimeraX it gives me this error: Unable to restore session, resetting. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/software/graphics/chimerax/lib/python3.6/site-packages/chimerax/core/ session.py", line 593, in restore obj = sm.restore_snapshot(self, data) File "/software/graphics/chimerax/lib/python3.6/site-packages/chimerax/ std_commands/view.py", line 214, in restore_snapshot for k,v in data ['view attrs'].items(): TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable After that I can't open the session again, so I need to remake it. Help, Yehuda Halfon

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Double and Triple Bond Stick Style
by Smith, Chase 05 Feb '25

05 Feb '25

Dear ChimeraX, I was just wondering why there is no way to represent a double or triple bond in either the ligands or the protein amino acids when viewing as a Stick or Ball-and-Stick representation? I sometimes use Chimera or ChimeraX to make visuals for my lectures, and the students often have difficulty in understanding due to the absence of the multiple bonds. I would love to have the ability to represent the double or triple bonds with multiple lines between the atoms. Thank you, Chase Smith ... ChaseSmith, PhD Chair, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences & Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry School of Pharmacy MCPHS University 19 Foster Street | WorcesterMA01608 T 508.373.5717F 508.890.5618C 978.855.7203 chase.smith(a)mcphs.edu www.mcphs.edu MCPHS University Confidentiality Note: This e-mail, and any attachment to it, is intended to be confidential and might be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the use of the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that reading, copying, disseminating or distributing this email is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately return it to the sender and delete it from your system. Thank you.

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Re: [chimerax-users] [Chimera-users] color by zone in chimeraX
by Elaine Meng 20 Nov '20

20 Nov '20

Hi Pranav, I’m Cc'ing the chimerax-users(a)cgl.ucsf.edu list (recommended for ChimeraX questions). I believe the problem is that when coloring the chains you are using “target c” which means to color only cartoons, whereas coloring by zone uses the atom colors. Since you only colored the cartoons, the atoms probably still had heteroatom color-coding. If you use “target ac” instead (even if the atoms aren’t shown), then as long as the color zone distance is big enough, I think you will get the color zones you expect. <http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/color.html#simple> <http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/color.html#zone> I hope this helps, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. UCSF Chimera(X) team Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco > On Aug 20, 2019, at 10:54 AM, Pranav Shah <p.shah.lab(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi Elaine and Co., > > I am trying to color a virus map with the relevant pdb file, the > series of commands I am running are as follows, > open virus.mrc > open virus.pdb > color /A plum target c > color /B lightgreen target c > color /C dodger blue target c > color zone #1 near #2 dist 3 > However, the resultant surface is rendered in splotches of red and > blue, which leads me to think the it is coloring the surface using > atom type. Could you tell me how I can get Chimera X to color the > surface using the colors of the chains only? FYI, color by zone works > flawlessly in chimera. > > Cheers, > Pranav

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Map "Blobs" tool - Generate objects?
by Christophe Leterrier 11 May '20

11 May '20

Hi, I started using ChimeraX for visualization and quantification of 3D microscopy images. The "blob" tool is particularly impressive to semi-automatically segment objects of interest and measure their characteristics. However, I could not find a way to generate an independent object from the picked blobs. This makes the quantification process unreproducible as it is not possible to store the blobs in the session or automatically measure all the picked blobs. Am I wrong in the intent of the tool, or is there a way to do this? Thank you, -- Christophe Leterrier NeuroCyto lab INP CNRS UMR 7051 Aix Marseille University, France

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bundle_info.xml API changes
by Eric Pettersen 01 Apr '20

01 Apr '20

Any non-developers feel free to skip this message. Even for developers, unless you are writing a toolshed bundle that uses the DataFormat, Open, Save, and/or Fetch tags in the bundle’s bundle_info.xml file, you could skip this message. For the two of you that are left, in anticipation of the the ChimeraX 1.0 release sometime this year we are changing some APIs we are unhappy with. Namely, the tags in the in bundle_info.xml that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. As they stand, they are not easily extensible and it is not obvious without looking at the documentation what the various fields do. On top of that, it is difficult to take the information in those tags and present interfaces for options in ChimeraX’s Open/Save file dialogs. Also, there is nothing preventing keywords added to the open command by one bundle from conflicting with keywords added by another bundle. We will be migrating those tags to use bundle_info’s Manager/Provider architecture (described here <https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/devel/tutorials/bundle_info.html>). Instead of fixed fields, you have keyword/value pairs, which is slightly more self-documenting. Also, a manager can ask a provider for various things, so in one case the manager can provide a partially processed “open” command along with the “rest of line” for the provider to handle its options, if any, and actually open the file, whereas in another the manager can ask for a widget containing options to show in an open or save dialog. In brief, the change allows us to solve some issues that looked pretty intractable with the old scheme. The exact details of the managers and providers supporting these functions are not detailed in that link (just the generic mechanism), but details will be added as implementations are completed. For convenience, there will some period of time when both the old scheme and new scheme will both work, but we anticipate dropping the old scheme before the 1.0 release. —Eric Eric Pettersen UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

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volume onesmask usage question
by Alexis Rohou 30 Mar '20

30 Mar '20

Hi there, I was trying to use "volume onesmask" to go quickly from a dusted surface of a low-pass-filtered volume to a mask volume with the same dimensions, spacing, etc. as the input map. I thought "fullmap" might be a way to achieve this (the doc says "The remaining options are the same as described for volume mask"), but I don't think that option actually works with "volume onesmask": volume onesmask #3 fullmap true *Expected a keyword* Is there a "onesmask"-like operation or set of options that creates an output volume that's on the same grid as the input volume? Thanks, Alexis

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Chimerax on a HPC cluster
by Thu Nguyen 31 Jan '20

31 Jan '20

Dear all, I administer a small HPC cluster (Rocks 7) at a bio research institute and a user has requested Chimerax to be installed on it. Has anyone successfully done so ? If yes, I wish to help some hints as to how it is done and an assessment of how it performs . Thanks and regards Thu D. Nguyen Systems & Computational Biology Platform Bio21 Molecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute, University of Melbourne www.bio21.org

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question about ChimeraX Hide Dust Feature
by Philip Schmiege 29 Jan '20

29 Jan '20

Hi I just downloaded the new ChimeraX, and was wondering where the Hide Dust option is located. I cannot find it. Any help is greatly appreciated! Philip _____________________________________ Philip Schmiege Graduate Student in Biophysics Li Lab, Dept. of Molecular Genetics, L5.162 philip.schmiege(a)utsouthwestern.edu ________________________________ UT Southwestern Medical Center The future of medicine, today.

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Fwd: Colors from snapshots
by Christophe Leterrier 29 Jan '20

29 Jan '20

Hi, I wonder why the colors in the snapshots (and movies) from ChimeraX are always washed-out compared to the colors I get live in the viewer. Attached is a screenshot with the viewer on the left, the corresponding snapshot on the right: one can see how the snapshot is desaturated compared to the viewer. From my limited tests it is the case when saving as both PNG and PPM, and I wonder if this could be corrected. I could saturate the screenshots afterward but it doesn't seem right to me to grossly mess with color levels post-hoc given how stunning the shaded rendering from ChimeraX are. Thanks, Christophe

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Scripting Resources
by llehmann＠uoregon.edu 28 Jan '20

28 Jan '20

Hello, I am a teaching assistant with the University of Oregon for our Structural Biochemistry course. Currently, the course is taught using PyMOL, but we would like to transfer to ChimeraX in the future. A large portion of the course relies on publically available scripts designed for PyMOL that currently do not have equivalents for ChimeraX. We are wondering if there are plans to have a ChimeraX wiki with scripting resources similar to PyMOL at some point, or whether we'd need to write any python scripts ourselves? Of course I understand that ChimeraX is still developing, I'd just like to get a sense of whether we can reasonably transfer the course to ChimeraX in the future. Thank you for your time. Best, Lauren Lehmann Biochemistry Graduate Student University of Oregon

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