Hi Abhi, I guess that CCDC-633286 is a beta-peptide (made of beta-amino acids with an extra backbone carbon compared to standard amino acids) - sorry, ChimeraX doesn't automatically draw ribbons for those. It only draws such cartoon ribbons for chains of amino acid or nucleic acid residues. You could try using "shape ribbon" and specifying the backbone atoms of your beta-peptide, but I don't know how well that would work. The ribbons and other shapes from the "shape" command are surfaces and they don't have the capabilities of the regular ribbon in being tightly associated with the atoms of the corresponding residues for purposes of hiding/showing/coloring, etc. Instead they are a separate surface model. <https://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/shape.html#ribbon> Chimera may have had a special "residue class" option in the Ribbon Style Editor allowing manually defining ribbons for beta-peptides, but ChimeraX ribbons are done differently and there is no equivalent tool. I hope this helps, ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. UCSF Chimera(X) team Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco
On Apr 22, 2026, at 2:32 PM, Das, Abhinaba via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Hi all,
Is it possible to thread a ribbon along non-canonical peptide backbone based helical structure? I was working with CCDC-633286, left is what depicted in the journal article and right is the default view in ChimeraX
Thanks, Abhi