Sunday, September 05, 2010

#Jmol - a paradigm shift in crystallographic visualization

Jmol provides state of the art visualisation of chemical structures. With the publication of Jmol - a paradigm shift in crystallographic visualization in Applied crystallography online, Robert Hanson argues how current technology provides unprecedented opportunities to teach about symmetry, uncertainty and the overall enterprise of molecular structure determination.

A portion of a DNA-protein complex - Toggle it !!
By just browsing the paper, you find many illustrations that show chemical structures that rotate, that can be toggled, that leave no doubt that chemicals are three dimensional. There have been many people who have argued that something like Jmol would be a worthwhile addition to Wikipedia. There is an extension that works and that is still waiting for some TLC so that it will be safe and fast enough. It will be the moment when the many existing Jmol generated illustrations in Wikipedia can be replaced by the real stuff.
Thanks,
     GerardM

1 comment:

Sage Ross said...

Hmmm... I wonder if we could bypass the security issues by only allowing those with a particular userright to upload structures. Not a great solution, but maybe better than waiting a while for the software to get fully sorted out.