A Visualization ToolKit based Application for Representing Macromolecular Surfaces

The homology search is one of the main strategies to assign a function to unknown proteins. In this context, the surface analysis can be interesting because protein function is strictly related to the macromolecular surface. Moreover, protein interaction is driven at first by the recognition of the geometric attributes of the macromolecular external morphology. However, it is difficult to work with surfaces because applications for molecular visualization lack of functions to manipulate in depth these data structure. In this paper we describe a visualization pipeline to represent molecular surfaces in the three-dimensional space, which relies on the Visualization Toolkit libraries, providing a high level and easy interface to them. This software has been developed in the context of a surface analysis project, but its classes and methods can be used and integrated in a wide range of applications.