The Viewer Software can be slow to load on the first time, and so be patient!
HOWEVER, BEFORE EVEN TRYING TO VIEW THIS HIGH RESOLUTION STRUCTURE YOU SHOULD INCREASE THE JAVA APPLET MEMORY LIMIT ABOVE THE DEFAULT.
The default memory allocated by Sun's JAVA virtual machine is no longer large enough to handle the memory requirements for viewing the high resolution ribosome structures and the viewer window will hang as a white screen even after Jmol loads in the next window. Additional evidence of this problem will be that, after closing all browser windows and instances to free JAVA memory (see below), you are able to view the 3D maps using the 5.5 Å models fine, yet for the maps using the 2.8 Å or other high resoltution models, over 4 minutes beyond the load time of the Jmol applet the viewer window will remain white and no molecule will be seen. Several sites detail this process for various machines; here is a helpful one for Windows PCs.
Additionally, the ribosome is a MASSIVE MOLECULE, and so loading the molecule will seem to take an inordinate amount of time in comparison to other, more typical structures.
THIS MAY TAKE SEVERAL MINUTES (ABOUT 4 MINUTES) WITH A HIGH-SPEED CONNECTION.
If you have your JAVA memory limit set high (e.g., 300mb) and the molecule does not show after about 4 minutes following the applet loading, close all browser windows and instances to clear the JAVA memory and retry. This generally fixes problems arising where other molecules did load and you are now trying a different large-sized molecule in the viewer.
After clearing Jmol memory, yet before even waiting minutes for both JAVA and a large ribosome structure to load,
you may verify JAVA and Jmol function properly by pressing
here to open a relatively small molecule in FirstGlance in Jmol as a simpler test.
On certain older Macs, we have only seen that the JAVA memory is only sufficient for the 5.5 Å models.
Please do not resize the window until the ribosome molecule is visible.