Chime-Plugin

Chemscape Chime is a Netscape Navigator plug-in that allows scientists to view chemical information directly on a Netscape Navigator HTML page. Chime supports most of the popular structure display formats that scientists use including MDL Information Systems, Inc. Molfile and many of the popular 3D display formats such as the Brookhaven Protein Databank (PDB) format (3D rendering code courtesy of Roger Sayle.)

• Displays structures directly within an HTML page, rather than through a helper application in a separate window.
• Displays structures directly within an HTML table, to allow for multiple structures within an HTML page.
• Supports MDL Molfile, Brookhaven Protein Databank (PDB), Minnesota Supercomputer Center's (MSC) XMol XYZ, Gaussian Input, IEMBL Nucleotide Format, RasMol Script File, Mopac Input File, and Chemical Structure Markup Language File.
• Upcoming versions of Chime will support all of MDL's structure formats including MolFile, RxnFile, and Sketch file.
• Structures within the plug-in are "live"; they can be rotated within the plug-in in real time.
• Displays 3D structures in any of the following formats: wireframe, backbone, sticks, spacefill, ball and stick, ribbons, strands, and cartoons. (3D rendering code is based on Roger Sayle's popular RasMol rendering program.)
• Supports multipart XYZ files, allowing HTML authors to animate molecular transformations.
• Allows the HTML author to automatically rotate structures in Chime, with no user intervention.
• Future versions will hot-link directly to MDL's ISIS/Draw. Researchers will be able to double click on a chemical structure displayed in an HTML page and transfer that structure directly into ISIS/Draw.

A prototype of Chime for Macintosh (PowerPC and 68k) and Windows (95, 3.1, and NT) can be downloaded immediately from MDL's Web site (http://www.mdli.com). An SGI IRIX version will be available in the near future. Chime requires Netscape Navigator 2.0 or greater.

Copyright Karl Harrison 1996.