Sequence Viewer

The Multalign Viewer tool displays individual sequences and multiple sequence alignments. Sequence alignments can be read from external files (several formats) or created by other tools in Chimera. Structures opened in Chimera are automatically associated with sufficiently similar sequences in the alignment. After association,

• mousing over a residue in the sequence shows its structure residue number
• selecting in the sequence selects residues in the structure(s) and vice versa
• structures can be superimposed using the sequence alignment

Various measures of sequence conservation and structural variation (RMSD) can be computed and shown above the sequences as histograms, and on the structures with color or worm radius. Secondary structure elements can be depicted as colored boxes or regions on the alignment. Regions can also be created by hand.

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Cavity and Tunnel Detection

Side-by-side views of a potassium channel structure (Protein Data Bank entry 1bl8) showing different approaches to cavity detection. On the left are molecular surface patches corresponding to the structure's two largest pockets by MS volume in the Computed Atlas of Surface Topography of proteins (CASTp) database. On the right is a tunnel in blue identified by the MolAxis server. Simple editing converted MolAxis output into a BILD file for display in Chimera. (More samples...)