In the previous parts of the tutorial you became familiar with the modeling and visualization programs SYBYL and RasMol. You probably noticed that SYBYL offered many more functionalities than RasMol, while RasMol appeared faster and easily produced nice images. Such dichotomy is not uncommon: many research-grade programs are strongly geared toward modeling, while others are meant mainly for visualization and production of pretty graphics.
The richness of functionalities in SYBYL makes it a valuable program for solving many biochemical problems in silico. For example, researchers in pharmaceutical industry use SYBYL to find drug molecules that best fit into the enzyme's active site, and researchers at universities use SYBYL to model how proteins fold into their native three-dimensional structures. Some other tasks that you can perform with SYBYL include:
You will have a chance to learn more about the advanced capabilities of SYBYL in other biochemistry courses.
While SYBYL was a good example of a molecular modeling program, RasMol has its strengths in visualization. It was written back in the early 1990's when most computers were slow at rendering three-dimensional structures, and speed was a major consideration in program's design. The speedy rendering engine from RasMol has also been implemented into the CHIME plug-in that allows simple manipulations of molecular structures within the web browser. You should be familiar with the basic capabilities of RasMol so that you can work with CHIME-based tutorials on-line.