ProteinShop and POSE: bringing robotics and intelligent systems into the field of molecular modeling

ProteinShop and POSE are graphical infrastructures for the interactive modeling, manipulation, optimization and analysis of molecules. They were designed to bring interactive computer graphics in the field of molecular modeling to a level not attempted by other visualization programs. To achieve that goal, we adapted inverse kinematics algorithms commonly used in robotics to permit interactive manipulation of protein structures in a natural and intuitive way.