NGL viewer: web-based molecular graphics for large complexes.

Rose, Alexander S; Bradley, Anthony R; Valasatava, Yana; Duarte, Jose M; Prlic, Andreas; Rose, Peter W · Bioinformatics · 2018

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

The interactive visualization of very large macromolecular complexes on the web is becoming a challenging problem as experimental techniques advance at an unprecedented rate and deliver structures of increasing size. We have tackled this problem by developing highly memory-efficient and scalable extensions for the NGL WebGL-based molecular viewer and by using Macromolecular Transmission Format (MMTF), a binary and compressed MMTF. These enable NGL to download and render molecular complexes with millions of atoms interactively on desktop computers and smartphones alike, making it a tool of choice for web-based molecular visualization in research and education. The source code is freely available under the MIT license at github.com/arose/ngl and distributed on NPM (npmjs.com/package/ngl). MMTF-JavaScript encoders and decoders are available at github.com/rcsb/mmtf-javascript.

Medical subject headings