At my kid's graduation party on Sunday I had a chance to meet Tom Goddard who, it turns out, works on a tool used to look at the spatial organization of chromosomes in the cell nucleus and protein structures determined by electron cryo-microscopy.
The tool is called Chimera (a fun name by any measure) and it is developed/maintained by the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics (RBVI) group at UC San Francisco.
Want to visualize density maps and conformational ensembles of molecular structures? Well, now you can download their tool and go for it. To my knowledge, it's all free of charge and works on major operating systems, so it's wonderfully Science 2.0.
I'm sure they do not want to do tech support for the uninitiated, though.
Chimera screenshot.
They're funded by the National Institutes of Health, which means they have to have citation tracking whenever possible, so here is an obligatory link so NIH knows they are getting the word out - even at picnics!
UCSF Chimera--a visualization system for exploratory research and analysis. Pettersen EF, Goddard TD, Huang CC, Couch GS, Greenblatt DM, Meng EC, Ferrin TE. J Comput Chem. 2004 Oct;25(13):1605-12.
