New approach for representation of molecular surface

✍ Scribed by Cai, Wensheng; Zhang, Maosen; Maigret, Bernard

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 480 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0192-8651
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1096-987x(199812)19:16<1805::aid-jcc2>3.0.co;2-p

✦ Synopsis

A new algorithm is proposed for approximation to the molecular surface. It starts with a triangular mesh built on an ellipsoid embracing the whole molecular surface. The triangular mesh is obtained from an icosahedron subdivision sphere with highly uniform vertex distribution, and the embracing surface is deflated stepwise to the best adherence of its triangles onto the surface of the molecule. The deflating direction of each vertex of a triangle is defined by the vector normal at this point to the previous deflated embracing surface. Our results show that the speed of the triangulation embracing ellipsoid method and the quality of the surface obtained by the method are faster and better than the method that starts with a quadrilateral mesh built from meridian and parallel representations on an embracing sphere to get the molecular surface. Furthermore, the surface obtained by the method can be used directly to approximate the molecular surface by spherical harmonic expansions.