DINO is a realtime 3D visualization program for structural biology data. It runs under X-Windows and uses OpenGL. Supported architectures are Linux-i586 and Mac OSX. Versions for IRIX, OSF1 and SunOS are made available sporadically, usually upon request.

DINO is distributed in binary form only, the current DINO version is 0.9.1.

Structural Biology is a multidisciplinary research area, including x-ray crystallography, structural NMR, electron microscopy, atomic-force microscopy and bioinformatics (molecular dynamics, structure predictions, surface calculations etc). The data produced by these different research areas is very diverse: atomic coordinates (models and predictions), electron density maps, surface topographs, trajectories, molecular surfaces, electrostatic potentials, sequence alignements etc...

DINO aims to visualize all this structural data in a single program and to allow the user to explore relationships between the data. There are five data-types supported: structure (atomic coordinates and trajectories), surface (molecular surfaces), scalar fields (electron densities and electrostatic potentials), topographs (surface topography scans) and geom (geometric primitives such as lines).

The number and size of the data the program can handle is only limited by the amount of RAM present in the system. No artifical limits are set.

Supported input file formats are PDB (coordinates), X-PLOR/CNS (coordinates, electron densities and trajectories), CHARMM (coordinates, trajectories and scalar fields), CCP4 (electron densities), UHBD (electrostatic potentials), DELPHI/GRASP (electrostatic potentials), MSMS (surfaces), MSP (surfaces), GRASP (surfaces), MEAD (coordinates and electrostatic potentials) and greyscale TIFF (surface topographs).

Output can be written as PNG, PostScript and POV-Ray (v3.1 and v3.5)

DINO is developed by Ansgar Philippsen at the Division of Structural Biology, Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland.

It is currently in a beta stage and freely available to non-profit and profit based institutions. Use on your own risk.

If you use DINO for presentations or publications, please quote:

DINO: Visualizing Structural Biology (2002) http://www.dino3d.org