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Molecule of the Month |
Welcome to a copy of the Bristol Molecule of the Month page!
Each month a new molecule will be added to the list held at the University of Bristol. The links will take you to a page at a Chemistry Department Web site somewhere in the world, where useful (and hopefully entertaining!), information can be found about a particularly interesting molecule.
If you wish to contribute a Molecule of the Month page, then email Paul May (Bristol) the URL and he will add you to the list at the next opportunity...
It is recommended that you use the latest release of Netscape for these pages, since they use a lot of the most recent features of HTML.
3D Image Formats: Some of these pages contain 'hyperactive' 3D images in formats such as pdb (protein database). To view these files you will need a 3D viewer program such as Rasmol (the Windows 3.1 version of which can be obtained by downloading it from (Bristol) and then installing it on your system). You then have two options. You can click on the image, and download the pdb file to your hard disk and you can then use Rasmol to view it locally. Alternatively, if you set the Helper types in your Browser configuration to recognise the following MIME type: chemical/x-pdb and filename suffix .pdb, and associate this with Rasmol. If you have configured correctly, then clicking on the images in the display should activate your viewer with the molecule in its window.
Embedded Molecular Structures: This is a system which works using a plug-in for Netscape 2.0+ called Chemscape CHIME. It allows 3D molecular structures to be represented on the page without the user having to have an external helper program, such as Rasmol. Some of the newer entries in the Molecule of the Month are being presented in both CHIME and ordinary format so you can still view them if you haven't got the plug-in. CHIME can be obtained from the MDLI site in the States, or the mirror in the UK, or the Windows versions of CHIME can be downloaded from the Bristol software archive.
Java and ChemSymphony: this is a system which allows rotating molecules to be displayed and manipulated using Java. It is available from Cherwell Scientific, and some of the later MOTMs may have this as an optional format. To view these MOTMs you will need a java-compatible browser.
VRML: Virtual Reality Markup Language allows the user to 'fly' around and through the object they are viewing, e.g. a building or a molecule. To view these files you'll need a VRML browser, or a plug-in for Netscape or Internet Explorer, such as Live3D (available from the Netscape site).
For the month of September 1997, the author is Dr Robert Lancashire, the host is the
Department of Chemistry, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica and the
molecule is hexol.
For best viewing you will need CHIME and the JCAMP-DX
plugin to view the IR data files.
Apart from the original MOTM at Bristol, there are other Molecules of the Month at Imperial College London, Oxford and Birmingham.
Created by Paul May, altered for UWI, Mona 16th June-97.
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