Abstract
With the rise of tablets, truly portable molecular graphics are now available for wide use by scientists to share structural information in real time at a reasonable cost. We have surveyed the existing software available on Apple iPads and on Android tablets in order to make a recommendation to potential users, primarily based on the product features. Among 12 apps, iMolview (available on both platforms) stands out to be our choice, with PyMOL app (iOS) a close alternative and RCSB PDB Mobile viewer/NDKmol (both platforms) offering some uniquely useful functions. Finally, we include a tutorial on how to get started using iMolview to do some simple visualization in 10 min.
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Acknowledgement and Declaration
Helen Ginn supplied a trial license of CMol (now free) for our review. In addition, we thank the developers of iMolview (Andrew Orry), PyMOL (Jason Vertrees), RCSB PDB Mobile (Greg Quinn)/NDKmol (Takanori Nakane), Ball & Stick (Jon Cody Haines), and CMol (Helen Ginn) for responding to our request to check the accuracy of Table 2. The authors share no commercial interests on the software or hardware described in this article.
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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Yiu, CP.B., Chen, Y.W. (2014). High-Quality Macromolecular Graphics on Mobile Devices: A Quick Starter’s Guide. In: Chen, Y. (eds) Structural Genomics. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1091. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-691-7_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-62703-691-7_24
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Publisher Name: Humana Press, Totowa, NJ
Print ISBN: 978-1-62703-690-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-62703-691-7
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