VISUALIZATION OF MACROMOLECULAR CRYSTAL PACKING USING VIRTUAL-REALITYMODELING LANGUAGE (VRML)

A program (XPACK.PL) written in Perl that transforms Brookhaven Protei n Data Bank structure files into three-dimensional crystal-packing Vir tual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) world files has been developed. The resulting VRML scene consists of macromolecules in various symmet ry-equivalent positions and the crystallographic unit cell. With a VRM L browser program, such as Webspace, the user can sail into the virtua l crystal-packing world and examine molecular packing interactively. T he major advantages of the program are that it is fast, portable and e asy to use. The three-dimensional packing models generated by the prog ram are portable and suitable for information interchange over the Int ernet.