Animating proteins

One of the most fun and exciting things to do with proteins is to view and animate their structures. Proteins are the workhorses of the cell. They are essentially nanobots that can create structure in a cell or perform enzymatic reactions to convert one chemical into another. Indeed, for a long time, DNA and RNA were viewed somewhat as just instructions on the way toward making a protein, consistent with the Central Dogma. We now know that DNA and RNA can also perform important structural roles and will often form a complex with proteins (i.e., a DNA-protein structure) to complement or enhance the function of the protein. Ribozymes are RNA molecules that can perform enzymatic reactions and hence are viewed as a likely starting point for life.In this recipe, we’ll learn how to animate a protein structure in our notebook using a library called NGLview (https://github.com/nglviewer/nglview). We’ll also check out another library, py3Dmol: https://pypi.org...