Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology/Help/Archive 1

Protein Imaging Tools[edit]

What are people's preferred utilities for producing images of molecular structures? The only one I've heard of is PyMol. --Username132 (talk) 10:34, 1 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I use SwissPDBviewer spdbv but I'm not sure if this is the best for your purposes. TimVickers 17:43, 1 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I use Cn3D. It's simple to use and also exports images in PNG format. PyMol seems to have much more functions. There has been some talk about standardizing protein representation pictures and I think this talk is relevant to it. Perhaps we should discuss the pro's and con's of the various imaging tools and vote on which one should be the standard imaging tool for the project. GAThrawn22 22:47, 2 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I used VMD for the ones I created, though I have also used PyMol, Chimera, and MolScript. I generally prefer VMD but that's largely because I use it often for trajectory analysis. I find MolScript produces nice images but is pretty user-unfriendly, and Chimera is okay but not terribly stable (the Linux version is very sensitive to nitpicky X settings; I've never used the Windows version). For reference, though, I don't really think we need specific standards for protein images (see proposals talk). Opabinia regalis 00:00, 3 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I used QuteMol. with respect to other molecular graphics tools qutemol features advanced interctive rendering effects that make easier creating nice comprehensible images. It saves antialiased high resolution png with transparend background. Caveat, it needs a recent graphics card! It exploit the GPU to perform realtime ambient occlusion, depth aware silhouette and other effects that usually are present only on high end rendering systems. ALoopingIcon 23:31, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]