Requirements:
- Mac OS X 10.2
- 20MB disk space
- Network connection recommended
- 1Ghz or faster processor recommended for highest quality rendering

Price: free!

Current version: 1.0.2

Download: link 1

Structure was written by Benjamin Blonder and uses source code from the NCBI C++ Toolkit and Cn3D.

Structure is a screensaver for Mac OS X that draws on the National Center for Biotechnology Information's protein databases to display beautiful 3D protein structures on your screen. It ships with about ten sample structures and via the Internet has seamless access to a database of tens of thousands more. Regardless of whether you know anything about biology or not, the structures on your screen create a mesmerizing and informative screensaver.

Structure's features include:

  • Support for five rendering styles: ball and stick, space fill, tubes, wireframe, worms
  • Dynamic downloading of files from huge database
  • On-screen display of additional structure information (attribution, source organism, amino acid sequence, etc.)
  • Fast OpenGL rendering with multiple quality settings


A screenshot of Structure rendering a hydrolase protein with the 'tube' style. Click to enlarge.