This program allows you to build and display models of molecules. It will do any of three traditional diplay type - ball and stick, space-filling, and wire-frame. You can also adjust where the light source is, the colors of various things. You can then rotate the molecules either using the mouse or in a continuous rotation controlled by the computer. Included with the program are a variety of molecules, ranging from small inorganics such as water, ammonia, and carbon dioxide, to larger molecules such as tRNA and a zinc finger protein. The commercial version promises many more (I haven't seen it). You can also describe your own molecules by making text files in a certain format.

The molecules are displayed really nicely, in full-color. The rotation is impressively fast. Since there are only a few options, the user-interface is also very simple and clean. This is one of the nicest program I've seen for displaying molecules on a personal computer (along with RasMol).

Computer: Macintosh and Windows

Source: Molecular Ventures, Inc.

Cost: Free demo (useful on its own) and cheap for whole thing

Last update 12h of June 1998