ICM Browser Pro Overview

Overview

Presenting a story about a macromolecular structure, its biological function and evolution, to a non-structural audience in an easy and compelling way poses a considerable challenge. ICM Browser Pro gives molecular biologists, medicinal chemists, clinicians, students a better way of accessing such information as it is being produced by structural genomics centers and individual laboratories.

Currently to understand molecular function in the context of three-dimensional structure, one needs to assemble four different sources of information:

1. a story comes from a printed article (or a pdf file) with specific but fixed a non-interactive 2D images,
2. a general 3D object can be obtained by downloading a pdb file and using a PDB viewer
3. structural animations are created as separate very large video files
4. alignments, chemical spreadsheets, data, plots, trees are either static pictures or need to be viewed in different viewer programs.

ICM Browser Pro integrates text, data, multiple specific views, interactive 3D browsing and multiple 3D animations and allows to save this animated presentation to a single platform-independent document that can be viewed with the free ICM browser. This "guided interactive 3D tour" which can easily be exchanged between scientists. Multiple specific views and animated transition and accompanied by all the necessary data, including alignments, text, spreadsheets and graphs, yet each view is fully interactive and can be further modified and annotated by the reader using ICM Browser Pro. Some examples of the .icb files can be found here.

Platforms. The browser is available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and SGI.