Interactive Protein Tutorial

for

CELL2007 The Principles of Cellular Control

and

CELL2008 Integrative Cell Biology part 2

Introduction

The aim of this tutorial is to introduce you to ways of examining the 3D structure of proteins. More specifically, we concentrate on the structure of protein domains that have known or putative roles in cellular signalling mechanisms. Many of the contents are drawn directly from Geraint Thomas' lectures.

The tutorial also gives you an opportunity to learn how to display and manipulate 3D structures, using files obtained from the Protein Databank. It is based on a program called JMol. This is a Java applet and should run automatically with your browser but you may need to right click on the window to permit this. JMol commands are a superset of the commands used by the program RASMOL, which you may have encountered but lacks some of the features familiar from PyMol.

There are two ways of working through the tutorial to view the molecules. One is to let the tutorial take charge and to follow the instructions and press the buttons in the left hand frame. The other is to set up a view of the molecule and use JMol's own menu to manipulate the structure. You may do this by placing the cursor over the structure displayed and clicking the righthand mouse button.

WARNING! If you manipulate the display directly, the sequence of commands in the left-hand panel may not work properly and you may have to restart.

Have fun!

Geraint Thomas © 2000, 2013
Comments to g.thomas@ucl.ac.uk.