[Chimera-users] Create an artificial bond between ribbons for 3D printing

[Hurt, Darrell (NIH/NIAID) [E]]

Hi David,

Chimera friends, please forgive me for stepping in here.

Chimera is a terrific tool for preparing proteins for 3D printing. In
fact, we use it at the NIH 3D Print Exchange to transform PDB and other
files into 3D-printable objects. Although I'm sure that Elaine or others
could give you some great advice about how to do this yourself in Chimera,
I would also like to invite you to try the NIH 3D Print Exchange. Once you
register (for free) you can use our "Create" tools to upload the PDB file
of your trimer and get several different representations of your protein
suitable for 3D printing, including a ribbon representation with the
individual ribbons joined.

If our automated tools are not sufficient for your purposes, I would be
happy to share a few hints with you. For starters, I think the tool you
want is called "struts" in Chimera:
http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/current/docs/UsersGuide/midas/struts.html

Hope that helps,
Darrell

-- 
Darrell Hurt, Ph.D.
Acting Chief, Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch (BCBB)
OCICB/OSMO/OD/NIAID/NIH
 
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On 4/28/15, 9:47 AM, "David Bhella" <David.Bhella at glasgow.ac.uk> wrote:

>Dear Chimera users,
>
>I am trying to prepare a ribbon diagram for 3D printing. As the molecule
>is a trimer, I would like to create a join between the ribbons such that
>the model is sent to the printer as a single part.
>So, I thought that I might be able to create a bond, but I suspect that
>the current tools may not be able to achieve this. Ideally I don¹t want
>to have to show side chains, moreover the bond needs to be preserved when
>exported as STL format and finally it will be quite long.
>
>The only tool that would seem to come close to my requirement is the
>distance measure, however I can¹t see how to convert that pseudo bond to
>a cylinder that will be exported.
>
>Any suggestions would be gratefully received.
>
>Thanks,
>D.
>
>Dr David Bhella
>MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research
>Garscube Campus
>464 Bearsden Road
>Glasgow G61 1QH
>Scotland (UK)
>
>Telephone:  0141-330-3685
>Skype: d.bhella
>
>Virus structure group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CVRstructure
>Molecular Machines - Images from Virus Research:
>http://www.molecularmachines.org.uk
>
>CVR website: http://www.cvr.ac.uk
>CVR on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/centreforvirusresearch
>
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