Chime Tutorial: Introduction


 This tutorial was adapted from the RasMol tutorial that was written by Dr. David Hackney and Dr. W. McClure. It is intended to illustrate some of the major features of Chime (Version 2) that are useful for the display of proteins and other biological polymers (i.e. DNA). Although Chime is convenient because it runs within a web page it is somewhat limited in the ease of use when compared to RasMol. In addition, you will have to obtain Chime as a plug-in for your browser. This is a problem for users with UNIX machines because the version of Chime available for PC and Mac (Version 2.6) is not available for UNIX machines. Therefore, if you spend a large amount of time looking at these types of molecules you may want to get RasMol and install it on your Mac, PC, or UNIX machine. Internet sites where you can obtain RasMol, Chime, and a tutorial for Rasmol are listed at the bottom of this page.

General Comments about this Tutorial: Before beginning, you should open your Netscape or Internet Explorer window to full screen size. If you want to have an image of the protein that is larger than shown on these pages you can activate a larger "pop-up" window that contains just the structure by selecting the jack-in-the-box icon: . This icon is located just below the graphics window on most frames.

-Gordon Rule, rule@andrew.cmu.edu   July, 1999
Department of Biological Sciences
Carnegie Mellon University

The use of Pull-down Menus in Chime: Although Chime is quite easy to use with mouse controls alone, it is much more powerful when you use the pop-up menus. The convention for describing the use of pop-up menus in this tutorial is illustrated by the example of coloring the molecule according to its crystallographic temperature factors. In this tutorial the train of mouse selections is written as:
Color¬Temperature.
The ¬ symbol indicates the next level of menu. You can try this simple command by moving the arrow over the "MDL" in the window and depressing the right mouse button and then selecting the individual items. The above selection cascade should have appeared as shown to the left of this window.

Chime 2 Viewer's Guide This PDF document summarizes the Chime 2.6 menu choices in capsule form.

The RasMol program can be obtained from the RasMol Home Page

The RasMol tutorial can be done online at the CMU BioServer

The Chime plug-in can be obtained from MDL Information Systems

This tutorial can be downloaded as a compressed file (816K), CMU Chime Tutorial, for local use after expanding with StuffIt Expander or a similar program.

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