QuteMol

After reviewing a few molecular viewers I decided to include something that has a single task in mind: provide an interactive high quality visualization system.

Add a GPL open source license and we have QuteMol. Due to the nature of QuteMol this review will not follow the traditional pro, cons and conclusion but mostly a few examples of the images you can produce.

QuteMol has 15 presets that can be applied to three different "geometries". These geometries refer to the use of Space-Fill, Licorice or Balls'n'Sticks.   You can check some screenshots with details about the way the image is constructed at the QuteMol gallery here. Let's move on to the examples:

Shape Perception using Space-Fill

Shape Perception using Balls'n'Sticks

Shape Perception using Licorice

As you can see in this example, a small alpha helix, QuteMol gives a per-atom representation. You won't get secondary structure or surfaces. However, the representations it provides are very nice indeed. Let's see what it can do with some DNA:

Double stranded DNA in Licorice mode with Realistic 2 mode

Double stranded DNA in Licorice mode with Illustrative 1 mode

Nice, aren't they. And they are illustrative enough without going into to much detail, like h-bonds or salt bridges. Now, making these images took me less time than that needed to upload them to this blog.
QuteMol also allows you to rotate and translate your molecules so you can get what you want, like this:

Double Stranded DNA in Licorice mode using Mixed 1 presets as seen from "above"

Bottom line is, QuteMol is a light, fast, GPL'd visualization software to produce simple but high quality images. It is citeware, that is, if you publish you should cite it as indicated in its webpage.
If you like any of the images above try QuteMol. Maybe you can come up with some photoshop'd images with a protein in one preset and a ligand such as this

Trehalose in Balls'n'Sticks in Cool (Dark) preset.

and produce a very nice image with both.