[Chimera-users] Small molecules and orbitals/ESP's

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Kenward,
I’ve seen several publications using Chimera to view orbitals and spin-density isosurfaces from QM calculations, but I’m not sure which format they are using to pass the information to Chimera.  QM programs I’ve seen mentioned in these papers include ORCA and Gaussian. 

Chimera reads several “volume” formats (density maps, electrostatic potential, etc.) and the resulting volume models can be viewed with isosurfaces.  The ones most often associated with QM calculations are “Gaussian cube grid” and “gOpenMol grid”:
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/filetypes.html#volume>

Several of the volume formats are most often used for electrostatic potential:
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/filetypes.html#esp>

 There is also a program AOMix specifically for molecular orbital analysis that writes out associated atom attributes for visualization in Chimera.  That is different from visualizing the actual orbitals, but AOMix users could be doing both.
<http://www.sg-chem.net/aomix/>

I hope this addresses your question; if not, please ask again!
Best,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and Babbitt Lab
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

On Aug 28, 2014, at 7:32 PM, Kenward Vaughan <kay_jay at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
> I am searching for a way to show small molecules with orbitals and potential surfaces from their associated QM calculations, in stereos display using our planned 3D vision setups.  Cross eye works well for some in a class, but mant students simply never get it.
> 
> It doesn't appear that any small molecule viewers are out there with such capability.  Is there some way to pull such information into Chimera to do this?
> 
> Kenward
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