Molecular graphics

[6] Thermal ellipsoid plots quickly became the de facto standard used in the display of X-ray crystallography data, and are still in wide use today.

[6] The first practical use of molecular graphics was a simple display of the protein myoglobin using a wireframe representation in 1966 by Cyrus Levinthal and Robert Langridge working at Project MAC.

[7] Among the milestones in high-performance molecular graphics was the work of Nelson Max in "realistic" rendering of macromolecules using reflecting spheres.

Stereoscopic viewing glasses were designed using lead lanthanum zirconate titanate (PLZT) ceramics as electronically-controlled shutter elements.

The first two protein structures solved by molecular graphics without the aid of the Richards' Box were built with Stan Swanson's program FIT on the Vector General graphics display in the laboratory of Edgar Meyer at Texas A&M University: First Marge Legg in Al Cotton's lab at A&M solved a second, higher-resolution structure of staph.

In the space-filling model, atoms are drawn as solid spheres to suggest the space they occupy, in proportion to their van der Waals radii.

A pair of CrystalEyes shutter glasses
A molecule of pamidronic acid , as drawn by the Jmol program. Hydrogen is white, carbon is grey, nitrogen is blue, oxygen is red, and phosphorus is orange.
Space-filling model of formic acid . Hydrogen is white, carbon is black, and oxygen is red.
A water molecule drawn with a shaded electrostatic potential isosurface. The areas highlighted in red have a net positive charge density , and the blue areas have a negative charge.
Image of hemagglutinin with alpha helices depicted as cylinders and the rest of the polypeptide as silver coils. The individual atoms of the polypeptide have been hidden. All of the non-hydrogen atoms in the two ligands are shown near the top of the diagram.