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Friday, September 9, 2011

Rasmol: A Protein structure visualization tool


RasMol is a molecular graphics program intended for the visualisation of proteins, nucleic acids and small molecules. The program is aimed at display, teaching and generation of publication quality images.

RasMol
The program reads in molecular coordinate files and interactively displays the molecule on the screen in a variety of representations and colour schemes. Supported input file formats include Protein Data Bank (PDB), Tripos Associates' Alchemy and Sybyl Mol2 formats, Molecular Design Limited's (MDL) Mol file format, Minnesota Supercomputer Center's (MSC) XYZ (XMol) format, CHARMm format, CIF format and mmCIF format files. 

The loaded molecule can be shown as wireframe bonds, cylinder 'Dreiding' stick bonds, alpha-carbon trace, space-filling (CPK) spheres, macromolecular ribbons (either smooth shaded solid ribbons or parallel strands), hydrogen bonding and dot surface representations. 

Atoms may also be labelled with arbitrary text strings. Alternate conformers and multiple NMR models may be specially coloured and identified in atom labels. Different parts of the molecule may be represented and coloured independently of the rest of the molecule or displayed in several representations simultaneously. 
The displayed molecule may be rotated, translated, zoomed and z-clipped (slabbed) interactively using either the mouse, the scroll bars, the command line or an attached dial box. 

RasMol can read a prepared list of commands from a 'script' file (or via inter-process communication) to allow a given image or viewpoint to be restored quickly. RasMol can also create a script file containing the commands required to regenerate the current image. Finally, the rendered image may be written out in a variety of formats including either raster or vector PostScript, GIF, PPM, BMP, PICT, Sun rasterfile or as a MolScript input script or Kinemage.

This software is freely available.

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