Exclusion selection criteria?

[yantipin]

This is a very common task when working with proteins: we’re typically interested in a specific chain, so we want to visualize that chain using one representation, while displaying all other chains—sometimes tens or even hundreds in large structures—using a different representation, so they remain visible without obscuring the main chain.

I couldn’t find anything in MolViewSpec regarding exclusion. Many earlier molecular viewers allowed such selection with a trivial expression like "protein and not :A". Now it's much more complex in Mol*, and it seems to be undefined in MolViewSpec.

[dsehnal]

The query language in Mol* can do this quite easily:

StructureElement.Bundle.fromQuery(structure, atoms({
    chainTest: ctx => StructureProperties.chain.label_asym_id(ctx.element) !== 'A'
}));

(use MS.core.logic.not(...) if building the serializable expression).

You are right about MVS and this is not an use-case we have considered for the current design. However, there are also plans to add support for MolQL (which Mol* uses under the hood) to MolViewSpec in the future.