Category Archives: Molecular Visualization

Turning MD Trajectories into Movies using PyMOL

Putting movies into your presentations is the perfect way to cover up a terrible underlying presentation help the audience visualise the systems you are discussing. Static protein movies can enhance an introduction or help users understand important interactions between proteins and ligands. PyMOL plugins, such as emovie.py, help you move beyond the ‘rock’ and ‘roll’ scenes in PyMOL’s movie tab. But there ends the scope for your static structures.

If you want to take your PyMOL movie making skills to the next level, you should start adding some dynamics data. This allows your audience to visualise how your protein dynamics evolve over time and a much easier way to explain your results (because, who likes 10,000 graphs in a presentation!? Even if your R plots look super swish.). For example: understanding binding events, PPIs over time or even loop motion.

The following tutorial shows you how to turn a static PDB structure into a dynamic one, by adding a GROMACS trajectory. Most of the commands you will encounter while making a static structure movie, so should not be too alien.

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Using PML Scripts to generate PyMOL images

We can all agree that typing commands into PyMOL can make pretty and publishable pictures. But your love for PyMOL lasts until you realise there is a mistake and need to re-do it. Or have to iterate over several proteins. And it takes many fiddly commands to get yourself back there (relatable rant over). Recently I was introduced to the useful tool of PML scripting, and for those who have not already discovered this gem please do read on.

These scripts can be called when you launch PyMOL (or from File>Run) and iterate through the commands in the script to adapt the image. This means all your commands can be adjusted to make the figure optimal and allow for later editing.

I have constructed and commented an example script (Joe_Example.pml) below to give a basic depiction of a T4 Lysozyme protein. Here I load the structure and set the view (the co-ordinates can be copied from PyMOL easily by clicking the ‘get view’ command). You then essentially call the commands that you would normally use to enhance your image. To try this for yourself, download the T4 Lysozyme structure from the PBD (1LYD) and running the script (command line: pymol Joe_Example.pml) in the same directory to give the image below.

The image generated by the attached PML script of the T4 Lysozyme (PDB: 1LYD)

 

#########################
### Load your protein ###
#########################

load ./1lyd.pdb, 1lyd

##########################
### Set your viewpoint ###
##########################

set_view (\
    -0.682980239,    0.305771887,   -0.663358808,\
    -0.392205656,    0.612626553,    0.686194837,\
     0.616211832,    0.728826880,   -0.298486710,\
     0.000000000,    0.000000000, -155.216171265,\
     4.803394318,   63.977561951,  106.548652649,\
   123.988197327,  186.444198608,   20.000000000 )

#################
### Set Style ###
#################

hide everything
set cartoon_fancy_helices = 1
set cartoon_highlight_color = grey70
bg_colour white
set antialias = 1
set ortho = 1
set sphere_mode, 5

############################
### Make your selections ###
############################

select sampleA, 1lyd and resi 1-20

colour blue, 1lyd
colour red, sampleA
show cartoon, 1lyd


###################
### Save a copy ###
###################

ray 1000,1500
png Lysozyme_Example_Output.png

Enjoy!

Graphical User Interface for MOSAICS as a PyMOL plugin — PymoSAICS

MOSAICS is suite of sampling methods for molecular simulations of motion of nucleic acid and protein structures. It’s applicability has been demonstrated in simulating large ensembles of nucleic acids (Sim 2012, Minary 2014) and proteins.

Starting with a protein/dna/rna structure you would like to examine, the basic modus operandi of MOSAICS is divided into three parts:

  • Pick your energy function or a statistical/empirical potentials (e.g. empirical Amber or CHARMM)
  • Pick your sampling methodology — e.g. parallel tempering
  • Details of simulation: solvent (implicit?), degrees of freedom (cartesian, torsional?) etc.

The energy function defines the energy surface with respect to your degrees of freedom (DoFs) and the sampling methodology is supposed to explore the conformational space along DoFs.

One of the main fortes of MOSAICS lies in the ability of defining hierarchichal natural moves. Defining regions of collective motion introduces experimental knowledge and intuition into the simulations, greatly accelerating sampling. Ability to define such regions  was one of the main reasons to start the development of the graphical user interface (GUI) for MOSAICS — preliminary version can be seen in the Figure below.

WorkshopPoster

Overview of PymoSAICS in its current form.

Since we are developing the GUI as a plugin for Pymol, we called it PymoSAICS. The initial focus of the project is on nucleic acids due to our interests in the structural effects of epigenetic modifications. As demonstrated in the Figure above, the GUI is divided into three main panels:

  • Current run — prepare a simulation
  • Simulation Manager — manage previous runs, import, export protocols
  • Help — That’s just a link to our website!

Users can upload their favorite structure via PymoSAICS or Pymol and play with the available parameters. The GUI is also an ongoing effort to streamline the available protocols in MOSAICS to shield the user from the many parameters that are available but perhaps not relevant to the simulation at hand.

We are currently starting beta tests of the application which (if you don’t mind not getting any support just yet) is available here, Therefore, if you are interested in becoming a tester please let me know, and you will receive a version around Easter (April-ish)! Contact me via konrad.krawczyk at dtc.ox.ac.uk

 

Making Protein-Protein Interfaces Look (decently) Good

This is a little PyMOL script that I’ve used to draw antibody-antigen interfaces. If you’d like a commented version on what each and every line does, contact me! This is a slight modification of what has been done in PyMOL Wiki.

load FILENAME
set_name FILENAME, complex	

set bg_rgb, [1,1,1]  	

color white 	     		

hide lines
show cartoon

select antibody, chain a
select antigen, chain b

select paratopeAtoms, antibody within 4.5 of antigen 
select epitopeAtoms, antigen within 4.5 of antibody

select paratopeRes, byres paratopeAtoms
select epitopeRes, byres epitopeAtoms

distance interactions, paratopeAtoms, epitopeAtoms, 4.5, 0

color red, interactions
hide labels, interactions

show sticks, paratopeRes
show sticks, epitopeRes

set cartoon_side_chain_helper, on

set sphere_quality, 2
set sphere_scale, 0.3
show spheres, paratopeAtoms
show spheres, epitopeAtoms
color tv_blue, paratopeAtoms
color tv_yellow, epitopeAtoms

set ray_trace_mode, 3
unset depth_cue
set specular, 0.5

Once you orient it to where you’d like it and ray it, you should get something like this.
contacts

Making small molecules look good in PyMOL

Another largely plagiarized post for my “personal notes” (thanks Justin Lorieau!) and following on from the post about pretty-fication of macromolecules.  For my slowly-progressing confirmation report I needed some beautiful small molecule representation.  Here is some PyMOL code:

show sticks
set ray_opaque_background, off
set stick_radius, 0.1
show spheres
set sphere_scale, 0.15, all
set sphere_scale, 0.12, elem H
color gray40, elem C
set sphere_quality, 30
set stick_quality, 30
set sphere_transparency, 0.0
set stick_transparency, 0.0
set ray_shadow, off
set orthoscopic, 1
set antialias, 2
ray 1024,768

And the result:

ligand

Beautiful, no?

Good looking proteins for your publication(s)

Just came across a wonderful PyMOL gallery while creating some images for my (long overdue) confirmation report.  A fantastic resource to draw sexy proteins – especially useful for posters, talks and papers (unless you are paying extra for coloured figures!).

It would be great if we had our own OPIG “pymol gallery”.

An example of one of my proteins (1tgm) with aspirin bound to it:

Good looking protein