Molekel is a free and open-source multiplatform molecular visualization program.
The program is developed and tested on the following platforms:
- SuSE Linux 10.3, Fedora Core 8 x86 32bit
- Red Hat Enterprise 4 x86 64bit
- Microsoft Windows XP/2000
- Apple Mac OS X 10.4 Intel and PowerPC G5
Features
Some of the features implemented in version 5.4 are:
- Read molecular data from different file formats
- Display molecules with different styles:
- Spacefill
- Ball and Stick
- Ball and Wire
- Stick
- Backbone (Residues)
- Ribbon (Residues)
- Schematic (Residue)
- Change atom and bond size
- Read atom colors from file
- Display dipole moment (for molecular formats containing this information)
- Animate atoms using the trajectory and vibration information available in some file formats
- Animate molecules read from multi-frame pdb and xyz files
- Display arrows to show the speed and direction of motion of each animated atom
- Animate molecular surfaces (while exporting amimation)
- Perform distance and (dihedral) angle computations
- Use a planar probe to visualize scalar fields (e.g. Electrostatic Potential) and display the value of the scalar field at a specific point in 3D space.
- Visualize molecular orbital iso-surfaces optionally color-coded with Electrostatic Potential.
- Visualize surfaces generated from density matrix optionally color-coded with Electrostatic Potential.
- Visualize surfaces from grid data (in Gaussian cube format or read from ADF tape41 files) optionally color-coded with Electrostatic Potential.
- Smooth surfaces generated from grid data (Gaussian .cube) with Laplacian smoothing
- Use grid data read from .cube files as molecular electrostatic potential to map onto SAS and SES surfaces
- Compute Solvent Accessible Surface as iso-surface optionally color-coded with Electrostatic Potential.
- Compute and display Solvent Excluded Surface, optionally using M.F. Sanner's MSMS program (highly recommended), get it here
- Save print quality (>300 DPI) images
- Export molecule to a number of molecular file formats
- Export to POV (Experimental, through OpenBabel)
- Export to TIFF, PNG, PostScript and PDF
- Programmable shaders (GLSL) support
- Visualization of radiation spectra (infra-red and Raman)
- High-quality multi-pass rendering with anti-aliasing and correct rendering of multi-layered transparent surfaces
- Blending of vibrational modes
- Export high resolution images