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Oxy-hemoglobin zooming in to oxy-heme (from 1hho.pdb by B. Shaanan). This is an animated picture; unlike with Protein Explorer, you cannot move it with your mouse.

Molecular Visualization Freeware
Protein Explorer, Chime & RasMol

This is the RasMol Home Page
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Protein Explorer, a RasMol-derivative, is the easiest-to-use and most powerful software for looking at macromolecular structure and its relation to function. And it's free! It runs on Windows or Macintosh/PPC computers. (linux users see below.) RasMol users will find its menus very familiar, and it understands RasMol commands. It is very fast: rotating a protein or DNA molecule shows its 3D structure. If you have never seen this, watch the image at the upper right of this page. (Click here to see another molecule rotate.) Look at our gallery to see still snapshots of other molecules. Also available here are Chime-based tutorials on

DNA,
Hemoglobin,
Antibody,
The Protein Morpher,
Infrared spectra with animated molecular vibrations,
Tutorials on many other popular molecules.

The above resources employ the Netscape plug-in Chime, freeware from MDL, and derived from RasMol. Here are reference materials and templates about how to create your own Chime websites.

What happened to RasMol? It is still available, but it is much harder to use effectively and considerably less powerful than version 2 of Protein Explorer (released summer 2000).

Are you using linux? (Or anything not Windows or Macintosh?) You may wish to run Windows concurrently under linux; this supports Protein Explorer quite well. Workstations for other platforms (unix, SGI, Sun, etc.) can use a remote NT session to run Protein Explorer in a local window. Alternatively, RasMol freeware works on all platforms (including older Windows and Macintosh systems). It is more challenging to use than Protein Explorer -- you must learn a teletype-style command language to exploit it fully. It is much less powerful than Protein Explorer (see the snapshots of Protein Explorer in action and the comparison with RasMol).

New to Molecular Visualization?

Check out ...

Gallery ... still snapshots; these molecules move in Protein Explorer
DNA, Hemoglobin, Antibody, Other Molecules ... on the web, explained while moving in Chime
Protein Explorer ... see molecules rotate on your computer
Molecules ... big, little, get the ones you want
Education ... resources for teachers and students
Animated Tutorials ... available for many molecules
Chime ... animate molecules on the web

See the CONTENTS PAGE of this site for more information!

Website initiated November 1995. NSF support began February 1997, and continued September, 2000. Emphasis changed from RasMol to Protein Explorer August 28, 2000.

Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed at this web site are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the supporting institutions.

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