Section 5.2  

Chime Tutorial
and Introduction to Secondary Structure

Introduction

Chime is a wonderful interactive molecular display program that is a plug-in for a web-browser. Created by Roger Sayle, Chime is a free program that allows anyone to display proteins, nucleic acids, and any other molecule mapped into a molecular coordinate file in three dimensions . While the molecule is displayed, the student can manipulate it in many ways, including translating, rotating and zooming in or out. One can display different parts of the molecule in a variety of ways to emphasize selected portions and gain a better understanding of the structure. This powerful tool and the capabilities it brings to all biochemists has until fairly recently only been available for people with several years of training or a large capital investment in computers and software.

The Chime program is menu driven. Once a molecule is displayed in the view window, the menus can be displayed by pressing the right mouse button on a PC or clicking and holding the mouse button on a Macintosh. The menu is a cascading list of commands, with many sub-menus which can be accessed fashion by pointing, clicking, and dragging.

Below is a slightly simplified but essentially complete diagram of the menus and sub menus of Chime.

 

Copyright 2002, John Wiley & Sons Publishers, Inc.