cellVIEW is an award-winning tool that provides fast rendering of very large biological macromolecular scenes and is inspired by state-of-the-art computer graphics techniques. cellVIEW is implemented in Unity3D, and it is publicly available at GitHub Open Source Repository. Because we utilize a game engine as development platform, we are able to release and deploy our tool faster, since our project only consists of a few scripts and shaders. We are then released from the burden of maintaining a complex software solution and from tedious deployment constraints. Additionally, since more people in the community are getting familiar with these engines, we ensure a maximum level of reproducibility among other researchers too, thus breaking the barriers caused by heterogeneous toolset usage across research departments. cellVIEW provides fast rendering by introducing new means to efficiently reduce the amount of processed geometries. CellVIEW is unique and has been specifically designed to match the ambitions of structural biologist to model and interactively visualize structures comprised of several billions atoms, which corresponds to sizes of small bacterial organisms.
The datasets that are displayed in cellVIEW were provided by cellPACK, a tool that populates and packs large biological models.
