Art and Science

Molecular Art

Images

David Goodsell (curator) and Teresa Larsen (judge) organized the 1998 Molecular Graphics Art Show, at the very successful Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society's 17th Annual International Meeting.  It was shown at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center.

Here are the two images I entered (and which were accepted): "Life Cycle" (1998) and "Arms Race" (1998).  The latter is now part of the collection of David Goodsell.

"Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright" (1994), this was something I created to demonstrate an application of texture mapping in biomolecular visualization. The contours indicate shape information, while the less saturated colours indicate regions with larger radius of curvature. The molecule is crambin, and the approximated molecular surface was produced by Bruce Duncan's spherical harmonics based "Harmony" package. The image was accepted as part of the Molecular Graphics Art Show of 1994.

Journal Covers

© 1987 Garrett M. Morris.	I created the cover image of two laminated, inter-penetrating, mirror image, tetrahedra, for the journal "Tetrahedron: Asymmetry" way back in the late 1980s, for one of my old organic chemistry lecturers, Steve Davies, who also happens to be one of the editors.
© 1992 Arthur J. Olson, Yng Chen  & Garrett M. Morris.	This is the cover of Science, 5 June, 1992, showing the structure of the mirror-image (D-amino acid) HIV-1 protease synthesized here at the Scripps Research Institute.
© 1994 Arthur J. Olson & Garrett M. Morris.	This is the cover of Science News, 19 November, 1994, showing a visualization of an AutoDock docking of a protease inhibitor.

Beautiful Results

• Crystals viewed using polarization microscopy.

Molecular Graphics Tools

• pdb2pov

converts from PDB to POV-Ray format for ray-tracing molecules.
• Swiss-PDB Viewer

can read in electron density maps, show sequence alignments, superimpose molecules, and easily create files for POV-Ray, a free ray tracer.
• MolScript

Display structures as images in various formats, or VRML
• Ribbons

General molecular illustration and error analysis in protein crystallographygOpenMol
has various AutoDock tools, including the ability to read and view trajectories from simulated annealing dockings. Written by Leif Laaksonen. Free.
• RasMol

can be used to view PDB files. Free. RasMol Manual and Quick Reference Card
• Chemscape Chime^TM

A plug-in that allows visualisation of structures within WWW browser pages. Download from USA or UK
• XtalView

for fitting electron density maps in x-ray crystallography. Has support for Raster 3D.
• MolView and MolView Lite

Free software for Macintosh
• WebLab ViewerLite and ViewerPro

For Macintosh and PC.

Garrett M. Morris's Home. Molecular Graphics Laboratory Home.