Protein Explorer:

1. Functionally, makes the visualization power of Chime accessible to students, educators, and intermittant users.

2. Technically, is a "wrapper" for Chime that generates scripts for Chime from buttons and menus.

3. Has extensive context-triggered help with color keys, a QuickTour, plus tutorials for special tasks.

4. Adds to Chime an extensive knowledge base to help interpretation, including links to external resources.

5. Supports largely qualitative visual exploration.

6. Simplifies some tasks useful to protein structure researchers, such as
   • Contact Surface Overview of Noncovalent Bonds
   • NonCovalent Bond Finder
   • Coloring by Multiple Protein Sequence Alignment
   • Animation of Conformational Changes
   • Planned: Display of Research Results (e.g. ConSurf)

7. Requires an atomic coordinate file (PDB file).

8. Does no modeling -- no changes to the structure.