Mike Carson

The program RIBBONS 2.0 allows real-time viewing of solid shaded ribbon models of macromolecules. The primary features of the software are the ability to create a wide variety of styles of ribbon drawings interactively and to toggle between various coloring schemes chosen to reflect assorted geometrical and biochemical properties. Spheres, cylinders, dots, polygons and text are also supported. The auxiliary programs included make RIBBONS 2.0 a powerful tool for visual structural analysis as well as for presentation graphics. The program is currently available only for the Silicon Graphics 4D series of workstations. A port to the Evans & Sutherland ESV workstation employing PEX is under development.

Crystallographers are increasingly determining structures of protein constructs that include His tags. Many have taken for granted that these tags have little effect on the native structure. This paper surveys and compares crystal structures with and without His tags. It is observed that actual refined tag residues fitted into density occur in less that 10% of the tagged sequences. However, higher resolution crystals are observed when this occurs. It is shown that these purification tags generally have no significant effect on the structure of the native protein. Resolution and R factors are not affected, but the overall B factors are slightly higher. Additional annotation in the PDB format to make tag definition explicit is suggested.