Rotating Molecules

1. Immunoglobulin Domain

Rotation will be fast and smooth after the 250K GIF file has finished downloading.

With Protein Explorer* you can display the molecule of your choice and rotate it with the mouse to help see the three-dimensional structure. (This image does not respond to the mouse because it is not Protein Explorer, Chime or Rasmol*, but merely an animated GIF image which shows how a rotating molecule looks in these visualizers.)

Immunoglobulin (Ig) domains (also called Ig folds) occur as repeating structural units in many molecules, including antibodies, the T cell antigen receptor, cytokine receptors (e.g. the platelet-derived growth factor receptor with 5 Ig domains), cell adhesion molecules (e.g. ICAM-1/CD54), and many others.

Each Ig domain consists of seven antiparallel beta strands, arranged in two sheets of four and three strands respectively. The two sheets are covalently linked with a single disulphide bond (shown here as a yellow rod). This cartoon representation is colored with RasMol's group color scheme, which makes the N/amino terminus blue, and the C/carboxy terminus red, with a spectral color sequence between these ends.

* If you linux (or anything other than Windows or Macintosh) Protein Explorer won't work on your computer, but you can use RasMol. It is more challenging to use effectively and much less powerful, so consider using a Windows or Macintosh system or subprocess instead. Here are some snapshots of Protein Explorer in action.

Technical Information

The above animated GIF was created with the GIF Construction Set shareware from Alchemy Mindworks, Inc.. The individual GIF images were saved with a rasmol script which contained repeating blocks such as

rotate x 2
refresh
save gif 01.gif

rotate x 2
refresh
save gif 02.gif

In order for the save commands to work in a script, the command set write on must be typed manually before running the script.