THE USE OF STEREOSCOPICAL VISUALISATION IN STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY

M. Hušák, 

Department of Solid State Chemistry, Institute of Chemical Technology Prague, Technická 5, CZ 166 28 Prague

It is not always very easy to understand the structure of complex biological molecules from 2D drawings only. A lot of operations as e.g. interpretation of electron density maps or manual ligand docking require precise orientation in the graphic data. Stereoscopic 3D visualization based on different image delivery for each eye is an useful tool in such situations. In addition the 3D stereoscopic presentation techniques could be very attractive for public presentations as well as for teaching purpose.

Following table summarize several parameters of the most important available 3D stereoscopic visualization methods:

Technique	Basic principle	Number of observers	Quality	Cost
Anaglyph	Different colors for each eye view	No restriction	low	cheap
Active based on CRT monitor	Fast switching between 2 images	1-3	high	cheap
Passive stereoscopic projection	Different light polarization for each view (IMAX)	No restriction	high	expensive
Active projection based on DLP projector	Fast switching between 2 images in DLP chip	No restriction	very high	middle
Autostereoscopic monitor	Multiple viewing zones with different image	1-3	middle	middle

Stereoscopy is supported in several chemical structure-visualization codes. Next table gives an overview of the most interesting one supporting stereoscopy through OpenGL standard:

Code name	Characteristic	Source
DS Viewer Pro	Commercial software for visualization of any type of molecular structure	http://www.accelrys.com/
VMD	Open source software for macromolecular visualization and visualization of MD calculations results	http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
O	Electron density maps interpretation	http://www.bioxray.dk/~mok/o-files.html
MolMol	Open source software for macromolecular visualization	http://hugin.ethz.ch/wuthrich/software/molmol/index.html