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Hans-Peter Lenhof

Numerous applications in Computational Biology process molecular structures and hence require not only reliable atomic cordinates, but also correct bond order information. Regrettably, this information is not always provided in molecular databases like the Cambridge Structural Database or the Protein Data Bank. Very different strategies have been applied to derive bond order information, most of them relying on the correctness of the atom coordinates. We extended a different ansatz proposed by Wang et al.
Molecular geometric properties, such as volume, exposed surface area, and occurrence of internal cavities, are important inputs to many applications in molecular modeling. In this work we describe a very general and highly efficient approach for the accurate computation of such properties, which is applicable to arbitrary molecular surface models. The technique relies on a high performance ray casting framework that can be easily adapted to the computation of further quantities of interest at interactive speed, even for huge models.
Molecular visualization is one of the cornerstones in structural bioinformatics and related fields. Today, rasterization is typically used for the interactive display of molecular scenes, while ray tracing aims at generating high-quality images, taking typically minutes to hours to generate and requiring the usage of an external off-line program. Recently, real-time ray tracing evolved to combine the interactivity of rasterization-based approaches with the superb image quality of ray tracing techniques.

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