Chimera Image Gallery

Photosystem II Ellipsoids

large image

The photosystem II assembly containing 20 subunits performs the first stage of photosynthesis using a chlorophyll molecule to absorb a photon and excite an electron. The left and right sides of the image show two ways of displaying the photosystem II dimer. On the left each subunit is shown as a molecular solvent excluded surface. On the right each subunit is represented as an ellipsoid with equivalent moments of inertia as the subunit. The cruder ellipsoid depiction gives a clear but coarse view of the arrangment of subunits.

The ellipsoid depiction was made with the Chimera measure command using PDB data sets 3bz1 and 3bz2.

  open 3bz1 3bz2
  rainbow chain
  measure inertia #0,1 perChain true

The molecular surfaces were created with the Chimera Multiscale Models tool with resolution set to 0 to make solvent excluded surfaces.

 © 2009 The Regents of the University of California; all rights reserved.