A Ramachandran plot can be used in two somewhat different ways. One is to show in theory which values, or conformations, of the ψ and φ angles are possible for an amino-acid residue in a protein (as at top right). A second is to show the empirical distribution of datapoints observed in a single structure (as at right, here) in usage for structure validation, or else in a database of many structures (as in the lower 3 plots at left). Either case is usually shown against outlines for the theoretically favored regions.