CIFmol – light-weight HTML5 / javascript molecular viewer for CIFs
The main aim of CIFmol is optimizing load speed and accommodating numerous views on a page (see the search tool below, which can retrieve multiple CIFs and render the structures therein reasonably quickly).
The underlying goal is to provide a light-weight Javascript CIF library for use by those cheminformatics applications that don't handle CIF files... ultimately enabling them to exploit the wealth of extra structural information inherent to CIF... (at a basic level, the library will provide a CIF to SDF/Molfile conversion, as SDF/Molfile seems to be the most widely accepted format in the cheminformatics world).
Search IUCr CIF archive
(article title/abstract word search, e.g. fullerene, chloroplatinum, alkaloid...)
Load local file (cif, sdf)
Although specifically designed to show small-structure ('molecular') CIFs, CIFmol also supports SDFs. The banner at the top of this page shows CIF-derived SDFs randomly selected from a structure database. To load an SDF containing 500+ structures click here
CIFmol started life as a CIF extension to GLmol, which provided much of the 'know how' and a framework on which to build a 3D CIF molecular view using the 2D HTML canvas.
Jmol also provided much inspiration. Indeed, one of the design prerequisites for CIFmol was that it could function as a front-end for Jmol, giving the user a quick view of a CIF structure before they give up because the Java applet is blocked or their mobile is struggling... (though this is no longer such an issue with the latest versions of Jmol).
CIFmol is currently under development and is copyright S. P. Westrip. Currently all rights are reserved, but the software will be made available under an open-source licence once it is good enough for public consumption ;-)
Pushing my luck here: macromolecules...
2POR (mmCIF) [show assembly 1]
Model style
Colour scheme
Fetch PDB structure (mmCIF)
Processing and rendering mmCIF structures quickly enough is proving to be a challenge...
