Stereoscopic viewing system for proteins using OpenRasmol: a tool for displaying a filament of proteins

We have made a stereoscopic viewing system for a large assembly of proteins using OpenRasmol. The stable version 2.7.1 of OpenRasmol is modified for the system, which uses an eye-ware instead of trained bare-eyes. Software rendering and other benefits in OpenRasmol are reserved. A 3-D graphic board is used just for the active stereo method, not for the acceleration of rendering. Our modification is simple one. In the results, an actin filament of 16-mers, where one actin monomer has about 400 residues, in space filling model can be rendered in stereoscopic viewing mode and can be made one turn within 10 seconds as quick as non-stereoscopic mode. Other 3-D molecular graphics programs with 3-D accelerator boards cannot render such a large assembly of molecules in stereoscopic usage mode as quickly as the modified OpenRasmol. An attractive application of our system is stereoscopic viewing with a large 200 inch screen in passive stereo method. Simultaneous usage is available for more than 100 persons with inexpensive eye-wares. The large screen allows us to investigate an interior of a groove in an actin filament in detail. Our modified OpenRasmol is distributed following the license, RASLIC, as an open source code at our web site (www.irisa-lab.bio.kyutech.ac.jp/openrasmol), where video files showing rendering speeds of our modified OpenRasmol are also available.