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. 2019 Jul 1;35(13):2323-2325.
doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty968.

BlendMol: advanced macromolecular visualization in Blender

Jacob D Durrant

BlendMol: advanced macromolecular visualization in Blender

Jacob D Durrant. Bioinformatics. .

Abstract

Summary: Programs such as VMD and PyMOL are excellent tools for analyzing macromolecular structures, but they do not implement many of the advanced rendering techniques common in the film and video-game industries. In contrast, the open-source program Blender is a general-purpose tool for industry-standard rendering/visualization, but its user interface is poorly suited for rigorous scientific analysis. We present BlendMol, a Blender plugin that imports VMD or PyMOL scenes into Blender. BlendMol-generated images are well suited for use in manuscripts, outreach programs, websites and classes.

Availability and implementation: BlendMol is available free of charge from http://durrantlab.com/blendmol/. It is written in Python.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
A green fluorescent protein with a highlighted central helix (Color version of this figure is available at Bioinformatics online.)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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