Mac OS X additions found at Macs in Chemistry Web site

Recent additions to the Macs in Chemistry Web site show the influence Mac OS X is having on the scientific and chemical field.

For instance, Gaussian 98 — a complete implementation of the popular Gaussian 98 electronic structure modeling program — is now available for Mac OS X. It’s the first time the product has been available on the Mac platform. Also, the high performance cheminfomatics systems from Daylight have been ported to Mac OS X.

Recent additions to the Macs in Chemistry Web site include:

Atom in a Box, a real-time visualization of Quantum Atomic Orbitals.

Atomic Mac, a periodic table of elements.

BLAST NCBI, a sequence alignment tool designed to support analysis of nucleotide and protein.

BLAST Washington University, a sequence alignment tool that’s free to academic and non-commercial users.

Daylight, a toolkit and high performance cheminformatics database. Note that though they’ve been ported to Mac OS X, it hasn’t yet been determined whether it will be offered as a supported platform.

Garlic, a 3D molecular visualization program that requires X-Tools from Tenon.

iMass a molecular mass calculator, a periodic table of the elements, an isotope distribution graph and a calculator that computes elemental compositions matching a given mass.

MacChess, a macromolecular crystallographic facility.

MOLMOL, a molecule viewer ported to Darwin that also requires X-Tools from Tenon.

pro Fit, a beta version of the data analysis and graphing package.

PyMOL, a molecular graphics package for structural biology and other sciences. It’s fully scriptable using the Python computing language — and it’s free.

Rasmol, a 3D molecule viewer ported to Darwin.

Scilab, a scientific software package for numerical computations.

Smell-o-mints, a free Periodic table of the elements for the Mac.

VMD, a 3D molecule viewer that, for now, requires XFree86.

Also, according to the site, Mathematica — software for doing calculations in science, engineering, and mathematic — isn’t quite ready yet, but is being prepared for Mac OS X by Wolfram Research.