Category Archives: Small Molecules

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?