In article <1990Apr13.143735.3276 at millipore.com>, you write...
>Anyway, he is looking for a program that will allow him to look at the
>structure of a protein given its amino acid sequence.
>...
>. He says that there is a program at Harvard called
>"Charm" that does what he wants, but this is hearsay.
>>Brian Utterback, Millipore Corporation, 75G Wiggins Ave., Bedford Ma. 01730
>Work:617-275-9200x8245, Home:603-891-2536
>INTERNET:: blu at millipore.millipore.com>UUCP:: {samsung,cg-atla,merk,wang,bu-tyng}!millipore!blu
The molecular mechanics program CHARMM was developed at Harvard
University in the Department of CHemistry by members of Dr. Martin
Karplus' laboratory. This program has been commercialized by Polygen
Corporation of Walthan, Massachusetts. An academic version of CHARMM
costs over $2000. I believe Polygen supports CHARMM on a very small
number of Unix machines as well as VAX/VMS systems. CHARMM is not what
you want anyway. CHARMM is not a graphic program it is used to create,
edit, and manipulate molecules at the atomic level. CHARMM does many
things including minimization, molecular dynamics and free energy
calculations on large molecules including RNA, DNA, protein, and lipid.
The result of CHARMM calculations are coordinate files which would then
be displayed with another program.
To my knowledge there are no free molecular display programs that can
display a molecular the size of a protein available for a DOS or a Unix
system. There is a program called PSFRODO for an Evans and Sutherland
Picture System communicating with a VMS system that is available for a
small tape processing charge.
A program similar to the CHARMM program is AMBER, developed at UCSF in
Dr. Peter Kollman's group, which is available to academic users for a
few hundred dollars. AMBER is not commercialized. AMBER is available
for Unix and VMS systems and also does not display graphical images of
molecules.
There are many commercial programs to display biomolecules graphically
on PC's and Macintoshes, Suns Sparcstations, SGI Iris workstations, IBM
workstations, Stellar computers, Evans and Sutherland, Digital
workstations and HP workstations to name just the major players in the
US.
Mike Cherry
Department of Molecular Biology
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts
cherry at mgh-frodo.harvard.educherry at harvunxu.bitnet
