CCP4MG Molecular graphics

CCP4mg is the quick and easy way to create beautiful publication quality images and movies. It is also the easy way to superpose and analyse structures.

The range of model drawing styles include ribbons, surfaces, spheres and ball-and-stick. Surfaces can be coloured by electrostatic potential calculated by the built-in Poisson-Boltzmann method. Nucleic acids can be drawn with ribbons, base blocks or base pair sticks. CCP4mg also displays electron density as cylinders or 2D slices, text with fine control over colour and font and any vectors in a range of styles. You can set up complex pictures quickly using the Picture Wizard and fine tune images with the display table and customised drawing styles.

Full details of the program can be found at the CCP4MG website.

In the simplest case, CCP4MG is started with a structure to load specified in the task input. CCP4MG may then be used to select a subset of atoms from the loaded structure and then save these to the CCP4i2 database. Once the CCP4MG session is finished CCP4i2 will present a gallery of the structures which have been saved. The atom selection may be done using any of CCP4MG's selection tools:- simple menu selections, Selection Browser, Sequence Viewer. The user has full control of which atoms are in the selections to be saved. The CCP4MG documentation" should be consulted for further information.

More than one structure may be loaded at a time by adding entries to the Atomic model list (Show list, followed by "+"). Also one or more electron density or difference density mtz files may be loaded, and one or more sequences.

Once the CCP4MG session is started, structures, maps, sequences, etc. may be loaded into CCP4MG by its usual means. Any saved selections or ensembles will become output files for the task and appear in the program report. Details of saving selections and ensembles may be found in the "CCP4MG Edit Search model" task documentation.