About the current project status

Sirius visualization framework is being developed at San Diego Supercomputer Center to address the growing need to integrate available structure and sequence information in a capable desktop environment. Sirius provides flexibility to render, color, show/hide, label any given atom of the structure independently of other parts of the display, move parts of the structure, build and edit 3D structure and sequence, as well as access online resources via Data Access component.

Unfortunately, further development plans (molecular mechanics, surface display, hardware stereo) are put on hold due to the remarkable lack of interest from the federal funding agencies. The dominant point of view appears to be that new and better alternatives to existing software should not be developed, and research groups should either purchase commercial packages or use academic software that has already been established.

The matter of funding or lack thereof is not entirely set yet, so if you think that Sirius is a promising application that should be developed further, please feel free to express your opinion to the program officer, Dr. Paul Gilna at the Division of Biological Infrastructure, National Science Foundation. His email address is pgilna at nsf.gov. Thank you.

The data structures and 3D graphics framework are derived from the Molecular Biology Toolkit (Moreland et al., BMC Bioinformatics).

If you have bug reports please use the form under Support or email Sasha Buzko at obuzko@sdsc.edu.

Project contributors: Sasha Buzko (overall architecture and development), Son-Huy Pham (Web component and help system), Ashton Taylor (Web site design).