Ribbon 
Ribbon creates and displays VRML ribbon representations of proteins.
It can be used on nucleic acids, but chain ends may not be handled well.
**Note that the command
resrepr
provides a (non-VRML) ribbon representation that better shows the
secondary structure of proteins.
Other advantages of
resrepr
are greater control over ribbon color and better
performance with nucleic acid structures.
Ribbon
is an extension in the Utilities category.
There are several ways
to start an extension.
Starting Ribbon opens a
dialog box asking which model to base the
ribbon upon, and offering a variety of ribbon types:
- Default (flat cyan ribbon, same as Flat),
- Cylinder (thicker red ribbon with a rectangular
cross-section)
- Surface (same as Cylinder except for coloring:
two faces are magenta, the third cyan, and the fourth yellow)
- Flat (cyan)
- Spline (only the edges of the Flat ribbon are shown,
one in red and the other in green)
Once Okay in the dialog box is clicked,
a VRML ribbon will be opened as the lowest available model number. If
the only structure open is a protein in model 0, for example,
for example, the ribbon will be opened in model 1.
The ribbon object can be displayed/undisplayed (with the
command
objdisplay)
or closed independently of the protein it represents (with the
Model Panel or the
command close).
UCSF Computer Graphics Laboratory / June 2000