Monday, October 11, 2010

Ra's al Ghul...RasMol?

Assalamu'alaikum (Peace be upon you)
Ra's al Ghul is the name of a villain in Batman...

But RasMol, according to Wikipedia is a computer program written for molecular graphics visualization intended and used primarily for the depiction and exploration of biological macromolecule structures, such as those found in the Protein Data Bank. It was originally developed by Roger Sayle in the early 90s.

Historically, it was an important tool for molecular biologists since the extremely optimized program allowed the software to run on (then) modestly powerful personal computers. Before RasMol, visualization software ran on graphics workstations that, due to their expense, were less accessible to scholars. RasMol has become an important educational tool as well as continuing to be an important tool for research in structural biology.

Here is an example of lexA protein on display using RasMol;


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