[Chimera-users] A question about subunit chain-letter ID.

[Elaine Meng]

On Jun 22, 2016, at 1:14 PM, T-I <ignatiou at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Elaine,
> I'm a student from London and I have a quick question for you.
> 
> I have a single pdb file consisting of 7 separate subunit chains (with TER between each chain).
> 
> I would like to know how to assign an identifying chain letter to each of those subunit chains (i.e, from A to G).without having to manually copy and paste columns of chain letters into the pdb text file.
> 
> This way when i scroll over each pdb chain in Chimera  i will be able to see the chain letter too.
> 
> Can this chain letter ID assignment be done directly in Chimera?..... and if so,  how and which tool do i need to use.?
> Thank you for your assistance.
> Ti
> 

Dear Ti,
I think you can use the “Change Chain IDs” tool (in menu under Tools… Structure Editing). If I recall correctly, even though you don’t already have chain IDs, the parts separated by TER will be listed separately in the dialog and you can specify a new ID for each.
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/editing/changechains.html>

There is also a “changechains” to do basically the same thing, but it only handles chains that already have IDs that are different from each other.
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/changechains.html>

I hope this helps,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and Babbitt Lab
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

P.S. we generally recommend sending questions to the chimera-users list, CC’d here