Lipid Bilayer Membranes for RasMol

provided by Eric Martz, 1996

PDB files are available for 1-palmitoyl 2-oleoyl phosphatidyl choline bilayers (200 molecules total), hydrated with about 15 layers of water on each side, for various configurations. These membrane models do not contain cholesterol or other components. The molecular dynamics simulations which produced these models were done at the Theoretical Biophysics Group of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign by Helmut Heller, Michael Schaefer and Klaus Schulten.

These data files were contributed by the authors under the condition that all derivitive works, including images, plainly include a citation of the original work, H Heller, M Schaefer, & K Schulten, "Molecular dynamics simulation of a bilayer of 200 lipids in the gel and in the liquid-crystal phases", J. Phys. Chem. 97:8343-60, 1993.

RasMol Images of Lipid Bilayers

There is also a movie script of lipid bilayers.

PDB Files for Lipid Bilayers

The Heller/Schaefer/Schulten lipid bilayer PDB files are available from the Institute for Medical Optics, Ludwig Maximilians University,
Munich, Germany or from the same site by ftp. They are also available from our Massachusetts USA ftp site for DOS (get the self-unzipping bilayers.exe file) or for unix (get the compressed Z files) or for MacIntosh (sorry, get all 5+ megabytes as PDB files).

Subsets of molecules were extracted from the above full bilayer PDB files to produce the images on this page. These subsets are documented in exheller.txt, and the PDB files are available for DOS (get the self-unzipping exheller.exe file) or for unix or MacIntosh (sorry, get all 4 megabytes as PDB files).

PDBTools

Some small DOS utility programs were made to assist in extracting the above subsets of molecules. These PDB Tools are available as ready-to-use DOS programs and as C source code.


Back to Martz Gallery.
Back to RasMol Classic Main Page.

This page is maintained by emartz@microbio.umass.edu