Several lighting modes are available, including ambient occlusion. The image shows hemoglobin (PDB 4hhb) with the four chains shown as surfaces of different colors and heme residues as spheres. The command lighting soft or the Graphics icon can be used to turn on ambient shadowing from 64 directions. The command lighting gentle gives a similar result, except tuned to emphasize larger indentations.

Potassium Channel-Calmodulin Complex

KCNQ1 is the pore-forming subunit of a cardiac potassium channel. It binds to calmodulin, and mutations in either of these proteins can cause congenital long QT syndrome, a dangerous propensity for irregular heartbeats. In the image, a structure of the KCNQ1/calmodulin complex (PDB 5vms) has been assembled into the native tetrameric form with the sym command. The view is from the cytoplasmic side, with KCNQ1 shown as surfaces, calmodulin as cartoons, and calcium ions as balls. A pastel palette from ColorBrewer has been used to color the surfaces, darkened with color modify for the cartoons, and “rotated” 45° in hue for the ions. See the command file colormod.cxc.

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