Creating attractive and informative molecular visualizations can take time—especially when you need to tweak multiple settings like visual models, color schemes, and rendering styles. If you’ve ever felt like this slows down your workflow or makes it harder to focus on analysis, you’re not alone.
Thankfully, SAMSON offers a powerful way to streamline this process: visual presets. This feature lets you apply curated visualization styles—with predefined visual representations and color schemes—across an entire molecular system in just a few clicks.
Why Visual Presets?
Visual presets serve as time-saving templates that improve consistency and clarity without manual tweaking. They’re particularly useful when:
- You’re preparing figures for publication
- Reviewing large biomolecular assemblies
- Switching between multiple visualization styles depending on the context
How to Use Them
To apply a visual preset in SAMSON:
- Click on Visualization > Visual preset.
- Select one of the existing visual presets, such as “Protein-ligand” or “Illustrate…”.
That’s it! Your molecular system instantly adopts the associated visual model, color scheme, and display settings.
Here’s an example using the “Protein-ligand” preset on a structure loaded from the PDB (1AA1):
Create Your Own Presets
SAMSON also allows you to build and save custom visual presets. This is helpful if you frequently use a unique combination of visual models and colors tailored to your research.
To create one:
- First, apply your favorite styles and settings manually to a structure.
- Then go to the Visual Presets section and choose to save your current setup as a new preset.
Bonus: Illustrative Style Inspired by PDB’s Molecule of the Month
If you admire the watercolor-like style seen in the RCSB Molecule of the Month, SAMSON has a dedicated preset called Illustrate… to recreate that look.
This preset applies van der Waals representations and chains are colorized per chain ID, producing a visually clean and illustrative image. Combine this with the Rendering > Presets > Illustrative setting to complete the aesthetic:
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re preparing figures, switching between structural systems, or aiming for a consistent visualization style across projects, visual presets can significantly enhance your workflow. With just a couple of clicks, you can reduce setup time and focus more on interpreting your results.
To learn more about visual presets and other visualization tools, check out the full documentation page: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/visualizing/.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.