Talk:Ribbon diagram

B-splines versus Hermite splines
The comment about B-splines versus Hermite splines is a little dubious. B-splines and Hermite splines are two different representations for the same underlying piecewise polynomial curve. In fact the article on B-spline points out that "A fundamental theorem states that every spline function of a given degree, smoothness, and domain partition, can be represented as a linear combination of B-splines of that same degree and smoothness, and over that same partition." Therefore, problems of fitting the data are all in how the fitting problem is posed, and have nothing to do with the choice between these two equivalent basis functions.

I think the article is better off if it simply says that a polynomial spline is fitted through the points, and leaves aside the implementation details of which representation is chosen for the spline. JohnAspinall (talk) 18:11, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
 * The spline discussion was mostly there before my contributions. But I'll have a try at re-formulating it in more phenomenological terms - ribbons from different programs do look entirely different, in terms both of the extent of smoothing (between 1 & 4 residues) and also in whether or not the ribbon center goes thru the Calpha points in regular structures such as helix. You may be right that the good ones could have been accomplished without using B-splines, but we didn't think so at the time of writing our software.  Dcrjsr (talk) 16:20, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Head-first discussion of ribbons for high-school students
I see this article has the style of writing for the professional which is fine but it doesn't do much to help introduce the topic to outsiders of the field. I would like to see a short introduction that is more friendly to someone who has absolutely no background in the field of microbiology, and which would quickly covers the basics of protein structure and formation by DNA. Once that is done, the article can launch off into its current format.

And why, I can hear professionals asking, would this be useful? It is because molecular modeling has become so easily accessible to the average person. Used to be that you needed time on a mainframe to render such diagrams, but that is not the case anymore. The free Mac/Windows software called "Avogadro" makes molecular modeling almost stupid-simple for anyone to dive into and play with, and the tools are only going to get better and easier.

So I'd like to see something in here at the lead of the article for people with absolutely no experience at all, who've downloaded a sample CHM protein model and played with it in a super-easy modeler tool like Avogadro, to help give them a quick grasp of what these ribbons are, what they represent, why proteins are ribbons and not discrete atomic pieces like machines, etc.

DMahalko (talk) 23:11, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, will have a try at this - probably also making use of links to other more general articles. 71.111.205.107 Dcrjsr (talk) 16:14, 21 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I still think this is really confusing for anyone who doesnt possess heavy knowledge of the subject. Some of the links are dead too, adding to the confusion. I cant change this myself, as it confuses me, but a simplified or "introduction to Ribbon Diagrams/Molecular Diagrams/etc." would be wonderful. Chardansearavitriol (talk) 22:29, 15 February 2011 (UTC)


 * An example would be awesome. Andy Jiang (talk) 03:44, 3 April 2013 (UTC)