> Dan, I wasn't 100% sure you got this.

I get the digest once a day, but thanks anyway!

> Two questions:
>
> 1) Are ORTEP anisotropy parameters just three scalars that are  
> Cartesion x,y,z-based?

Umm... I'll answer with a qualified "yes", but getting those out of the
ORTEP-style input files is sometimes a challenge.  If you want a  
scary look
at the most archaic way of getting data into a program, look here:

   http://www.ornl.gov/sci/ortep/doc/input.html#temp

The thermal ellipsoid is specified with an upper triangular matrix:
b11, b22, b33, b12, b13, b23, but the basis set for this matrix may
be the crystal axes.

> 2) Same question for your work.

We've got uniaxial ellipsoids (a = b != c) , so a single vector is  
enough to specify
the orientation of the c axis.  Also, we've been packing the extra  
data on the
eccentricity into the extended columns in the XYZ file format:

atype    x  y  z    ecc     cx  cy  cz

Here, cx, cy, and cz specify the orientation of the "c" axis of the  
ellipsoid,
and ecc is the length-to-breadth ratio (c/a).    We can easily clone  
the XyzReader
to make something more general that would specify two of the three axes:

atype   x y z    a  b  c   ax ay az    bx by bz

(or we could even specify all three, but we'd need to check for  
orthogonality
of the vectors.)

To answer Miguel's questions:

>>> Q: Do people want to render proteins with thousands of  
>>> ellipsoids? Or is
>>> this generally applied to smaller molecules (or small portions of
>>> proteins)?

Most ORTEP renderings are for smaller molecules (probably at most a  
hundred
or so thermal ellipsoids).   We're rendering liquid crystalline  
simulations
with a few thousand ellipsoids (and a few thousand frames of the  
simulation),
but we typically use atoms / vectors to find an orientation we like  
and then
export to pov ray.

>>> Q: Are all the ellipsoids the same shape, just scaled to  
>>> different sizes?
>>> Or are some of them more elongated than others?

In ORTEP, each atom has a different ellipsoid (with different  
eccentricities).

In our stuff, there's a limited number of possible ellipsoidal  
geometries.

>>> Q: Within a given molecule, are there usually multiple ellipsoids  
>>> that are
>>> the same size & shape?

In ORTEP?  No.   In our stuff?  Sometimes.

  --Dan

***********************************************
   J. Daniel Gezelter
   Associate Professor
   Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
   251 Nieuwland Science Hall
   University of Notre Dame
   Notre Dame, IN 46556-5670

   phone:  +1 (574) 631-7595
   fax:    +1 (574) 631-6652
   e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
   web:    http://www.nd.edu/~gezelter
************************************************




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