[chimerax-users] Saving biomt record for generated icosahedral

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Ibrahim,
ChimeraX doesn't generate BIOMT records, but you can save PDB and mmCIF files with the "save" command or menu: File... Save.  
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/save.html#formats>

Maybe I am misunderstanding the question. If you already built the full model, then you don't need the BIOMT records, right?  They are only needed to generate the full model from the asymmetric unit, if I understand correctly.  But maybe you want to generate BIOMT records so that you only need to save the asymmetric unit as a PDB file and then put those BIOMT records in the file.

I am no expert on icosahedral capsids and symmetry operations, so the following is a guess:

Don't all icosahedral capsids have the same BIOMT records?  For example, see this page:
<http://viperdb.scripps.edu/Icosahedral_Matrices.php>

... which seems to agree with what I see in the PDB file for one example icosahedral capsid structure, 1POV.  So maybe as long as you have the asymmetric unit coordinates in the proper frame of reference, you can just copy the BIOMT records from any of those PDB files, such as 1POV.

Best,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

> On Nov 20, 2020, at 5:41 PM, Moustafa, Ibrahim M. <ria2 at psu.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
>   I built a full icosahedral model from ASU in chimeraX, how can I save the coordinates and BIOMT record of the generated full-model?
>     Thanks for helping.
>   Ibrahim
>