[Chimera-users] Use of sym command

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Anthony,
See the Unit Cell tool (in menu under Tools... Higher-Order Structure).  You have a choice of which symmetry information to use and/or how many unit cells, etc.  Of course, you have to choose a structure that has such symmetry information in the first place:
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/unitcell/unitcell.html>

Unit Cell can use any/all of the crystallographic symmetry information, but it doesn’t use BIOMT (biological unit) information.  One can apply BIOMT symmetry with the “sym” command or the Multiscale Models tool (also under Tools… Higher-Order Structure). 
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/sym.html>
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/multiscale/framemulti.html>

I hope this helps,
Elaine
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Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco


> On Jul 10, 2018, at 5:08 AM, Lee A.G. <A.G.Lee at soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> Hi Elaine
> Very many thanks for clearing that up for me!
> I was hoping that there was something in Chimera like the symexp command in PyMol  that takes a protein and then creates all its crystallographic neighbours (all symmetry related objects) within  a given cut-off distance from the original molecule. I think that what I will have to do is to generate the symmetry-related molecules using PyMol, save them as PDB files, and then open them in Chimera for further handling.
> Many thanks once again
> Anthony