QuteMol is an interactive, high quality molecular visualization application written by Marco Tarini and Paolo Cignoni of the Visual Computing Lab at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI), an institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). QuteMol exploits current GPU capabilites through OpenGL shaders to offer an array of innovative visual effects such as those shown below. QuteMol visualization techniques are aimed at improving clarity and understanding of the 3D shape and structure of large complex molecules.

QuteMol is an open source (GPL) application like NanoEngineer-1 (NE1) and we've started our own branch based on the original code called QuteMol_X which we're customizing for tighter NE1 integration, with Marco's and Paulo's help.

When users launch QuteMol_X from NE1 it opens with the molecular structure already loaded, and with the same coloring, display style, orientation, and zoom as the originating structure in NE1. NE1 can also export standard PDB files with custom REMARK records containing the display data that QuteMol_X reads to display the molecular structure as it was saved via NE1. These portable PDB files can be sent to any QuteMol_X user to communicate a specific display of a molecular structure, along with the usual chemical structure found in PDB files.

Citing Instructions

If you use images made with QuteMol_X in a scientific paper or book, cite QuteMolX:

QuteMolX, v.0.5.0, Nanorex, Inc., www.nanorex.com, 2008. 

And cite the paper that presented QuteMol:

Marco Tarini, Paolo Cignoni, Claudio Montani:  Ambient Occlusion and Edge Cueing for Enhancing Real Time Molecular Visualization, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics , Volume 12, Issue 5, Pages 1237-1244, 2006, ISSN: 1077-2626

And if you used NanoEngineer-1 to create the structures rendered by QuteMolX in a scientific paper or book, include the following citation:

NanoEngineer-1, v.a9.1. Nanorex, Inc., www.nanorex.com, 2007.