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| About Warren DeLano (DeLano Scientific LLC) |
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Warren DeLano is the developer of the PyMOL Open-Source Molecular Viewer and the founder of DeLano Scientific LLC, a software services company in Palo Alto, California.
After growing up as a Silicon Valley computer “hacker”, Warren spent his undergraduate years at Yale University in the laboratory of Axel Brunger, where he worked as a scientific programmer on the X-PLOR and CNS structure-determination packages while obtaining a B.S. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He then returned to the West Coast to complete a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California, San Francisco, with most of his graduate work performed as a visiting scientist at Genentech, Inc. in the laboratory of James Wells.
As he was completing his doctorate, Warren helped launch Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a fragment-based drug-discovery company founded by James Wells and Jonathan Ellman. During his five years an Informatics Scientist, and later, Informatics Manager, he led development of the company’s computational and database infrastructure for supporting compound registration and inventory, assay screening, fragment assembly, and medicinal as well as computational chemistry.
Warren launched Open-Source PyMOL in early 2000 as an evenings-and-weekends side project with the hopes of bringing Linux-like community software practices to the fields of molecular visualization and modeling. The effort succeeded, and the resulting demand for PyMOL-related services enabled him to transition to full-time development, maintenance, and support of the product through DeLano Scientific LLC in April 2003.
Since then, PyMOL has become widely adopted by researchers in structure biology and related fields, and DeLano Scientific continues to provide commercial PyMOL builds with accompanying services to most large pharmaceutical companies and many leading research institutions. Although the package is still primarily used for molecular visualization and communications, the company continues to develop the open-source code with the goal of evolving it into a general environment for interactive molecular modeling through effective integration of complementary open-source tools.
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PyMOL: An Open-Source Visualization Tool for Chemistry and Biology
Warren L. DeLano, Ph.D. (DeLano Scientific LLC, Palo Alto, California)
Since being released to the internet nearly ten years ago, PyMOL has become a widely used tool for communicating results from structural biology and computational chemistry. PyMOL’s main benefits lie in the areas of image quality, cross-platform compatibility, animation support, and scripting (via commands or through Python). Of course, there is also the project’s open-source status, which permits free use of the open-source versions (which mainly target Linux). Here we survey the software’s present capabilities and primary use cases and discuss how the package is likely to evolve in coming years in response to changing graphics hardware and software infrastructure.
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