RasMol is a good viewer for showing PDB-formatted files, it may be the most widely used three-dimensional molecular graphics viewer in the world. It is available for almost all current platforms including UNIX, Windows and Macintosh. On the PC and Mac it is faster at rotating molecules than MAGE, and indeed faster than on some high-end UNIX workstations. It has a lot of features buried in a command-line interface in addition to simple menus listing useful defaults. See:
Sayle, R.A., and Milner-White, E.J. (1995) RASMOL: biomolecular graphics for all. Trends in Biochemical Sciences 20:374-376.
Roger Sayle's RasMol can be obtained
from the download page
at the
RasMol Home Page, a
service maintained by Eric Martz. There you will find tutorial information,
the RasMol manual and a Discussion List where you can ask questions about
RasMol. Please familiarize yourself with the program and its demonstration files
before using it to view Entrez-generated PDB files.
How can I obtain RasMol?
How do I set up my WWW Browser to Launch RasMol?
If you are using WWW Entrez, you can set-up your WWW browser to launch
the 3D viewing sofware automatically. See our guide to
installing a structure viewer for details.
Revised April 16 1998, Comments and questions to:
info@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov