BESE 301 Biomolecular Graphics and Interpretation
The course will begin with the recapitulation of the basics of protein and nucleic acids structures, including folds, secondary structure, quaternary structures, and types of interactions. This forms the basics of the course. Participants will then learn how to access and interpret structural information from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). A significant part of the course will be hands-on training of different software like Pymol, Chimera, and ChimeraX, which are all powerful visualization tools. In all three software packages, the users will be trained so that they can handle the basics and some of the more advanced tools. The students will get guidance on how to use the software, and will then apply the knowledge by mastering several exercises. First, they will learn how to analyze the structures so that they can identify and describe important molecular interaction networks, interfaces, ligands, etc. In the next step, the students will learn how to depict those findings in high-quality graphical images that can be used for publications also for their projects which are ongoing in their labs. An emphasis is laid on the concept to depict complicated things in the simplest possible way so that still the major findings can be clearly seen without getting confused if unnecessary details. Finally, the students will learn how to set up scenes for a molecular movie and will learn how to produce a simple movie using ChimeraX. In summary, the course will be beneficial for all students in bioscience because they will learn how to interpret existing structural information for their own research and to translate this into a professional high-quality structural image, which they can generate on their own for their future publications.