SpiderGL : BLT2 GPCR receptor electrostatic potential

Supplementary material to Catoire et al., JBN 2011

< Visualization courtesy of Monica Zoppè and colleagues >

Visualization of field lines of the membrane-inserted BLT2 GPCR, with a particularly strong attraction to its extracellular binding site, implemented in a modern WebGL-capable web-browser. This animation is supplementary material to the article Electrostatically-driven fast association and perdeuteration allow transferred cross-relaxation detection for G protein-coupled receptor ligands with equilibrium dissociation constants in the high-to-low nanomolar range by Catoire et al., Journal of Biomolecular NMR 2011.

The animation illustrates the electrostatic potential (Ep) of a BLT2 receptor model calculated on a simulation snapshot. Two known agonists have a net charge of -1 and interact with the highly positively charged extracellular surface of the receptor (on top). Field lines drive the agonists to their binding site in this upper, solvent-exposed part of the molecule. The binding pocket is well-accessible, situated close to the surface, which is also observed for other class A GPCRs.

The surface color mapping corresponds to values of the molecular lipophilicity potential (MLP) ranging for typical proteins between -3 and +1, transformed into grey scale. The scale is black for very hydrophilic and white for very hydrophobic parts of the molecule.

Molecular visualization applications of SpiderGL are described in more detail in M. Callieri et al., Visualization methods for molecular studies on the web platform, The Web3D 2010 Conference, 22-24 July 2010, Los Angeles, California


Hide Particles Atoms Rendering Stereo Rendering

Controls

The scene can be navigated with the mouse. Use the left mouse button for rotation, the middle mouse button for zoom.

Troubleshooting

It may take a few seconds to load this page. If nothing appears, in the properties panel of Chrome, try to add the startup flag

--ignore-gpu-blacklist
For further diagnostics, a log file is provided below.

Alternative movie

WebGL is still a young technique and may not work equally well on all hardware and software. We thus provide an additional movie illustrating the above visualization. It can either be viewed on my YouTube channel or downloaded directly from here (32 Mb).

SpiderGL © 2009 - 2010 Visual Computing Lab - ISTI - CNR
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