Today's focus will be on a particular protein structure published in 2000 on Nature (PDB: 1ej6) resolved by X-ray crystallography.

Reovirus pentamer subunit from 5 different angles of view.


The starting protein is made of 5 different domains and can be assembled in order to form the entire external reovirus capsid.

Monomer, made of chains A (blue), B (pink), C (green), D (white), and E (orange)
.

The aim was to play a bit with the commands zoom and crossfade, to create a short animation in which we can see (i) the different chains of the monomer, (ii) how 5 monomers assemble the pentameric unit, and (iii) give a general idea of the pentamer structure. This is my result:


Movie script:

movie record; 

turn y -0.5 80; 

wait 80; 

crossfade;

hide #4; 

show #3; 

wait 40;

turn x 0.12 100;

zoom 0.7 100;

wait 100; 

movie encode directory/moviename.mp4

Notes: 

The color transition is obtained by hiding and showing two different aligned models. To work, it is important that both models are visible, by checking in the model panel, and are being shown or hidden, by using the command line.

!! In this script #3 correspond to the pentamer assembly with the single protein monomer highlighted in orange, and model #4 is the single monomer colored by chains.

The crossfade command makes a transition between the two models by using 30 frames by default.

To record again the movie the model needs to be set up again by playing backward the movements, you can use this other command:

zoom 1.42 100

turn x -0.12 100

show #4 

hide #3

turn y 0.5 80; 

Finally, as general advice for people that do not have very powerful CPUs, like me, I suggest turning off the full light option, and keeping it set to simple while moving the model. The render took me about 10 minutes, and you can download the original .cxs file by clicking here.

Complete article:

Reinisch, K. M., Nibert, M. L., & Harrison, S. C. (2000). Structure of the reovirus core at 3.6? Å resolution. Nature, 404(6781), 960-967.