Density maps
Fri, 08/01/2008 - 07:16
This might or might not be feasible, but a very nice feature that could be included is the ability to visualize electron density maps. To really show off a structure, ie at a poster presentation, it would be ideal to be able to also show the electron density of that structure. It is possible to download the density of quite a few structures in the pdb via Uppsala Electron Density Server (http://eds.bmc.uu.se/eds/). I believe that the iphone is capable of rendering electron density in a reasonably snappy way, just considering the raw power of the unit, but I have no clue of how difficult it would be to implement.
Cheers
Mon, 08/04/2008 - 06:23
#2
Sounds good. I'm not sure whether it would help, but checking how other programs calculate the geometry might be useful. The source code for my favorite program for viewing density (and building models) is Coot is freely available at http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~emsley/coot/ , and Paul Emsley (the developer) is rather friendly. In fact it has shortly been mentioned that an Iphone/Itouch version of Coot could be interesting in the Coot mailing list.. Anyway, might be worth checking out.
The hardware is capable of pushing the appropriate number of triangles to make this work, especially if you just want to do this as a mesh. The tricky part is pulling in the data and calculating the geometry for it.
It's on my list, but I don't know how long it would take to implement.