Nucleotides

Special representations of DNA and RNA can be displayed with the Nucleotides tool or the command nucleotides. Different levels of abstraction are available. The figure shows a ribbon backbone combined with the following sidechain (sugar/base) options:

• ladder rungs
• filled-ring atomic representations
• "lollipops" in which bases are shown as ellipsoids and sugars as tubes

Bases can also be displayed as boxes or elliptical tubes, with or without bumps to indicate orientation. The colors of the special representations will update automatically to match the corresponding atoms.

(More features...)

Sliced Potassium Channel

Potassium channel (Protein Data Bank entry 1bl8) on a dark slate blue background with potassium ions shown in firebrick. The channel is comprised of four chains. Each chain has been rainbow-colored from blue at the N-terminus to red at the C-terminus, but only the surface of the channel is shown. The surface has been sliced with a per-model clipping plane. The surface cap color is plum except with opacity set to 0.8. The shininess and brightness have been set to 128 and 8, respectively, and the lights on the scene have been moved from their default positions. The subdivision quality (related to the smoothness of the spherical ions) is 5.0, and the molecular surface was computed with probe radius and vertex density set to 1.0 and 6.0, respectively. (More samples...)