Editing LiteMol:Introduction (section)

=What is LiteMol?=

LiteMol is a visualization tool designed to be user-friendly yet flexible, interactive, and very fast even for extremely large protein structures. LiteMol can be run directly from your web browser without any installation and it does not require any plugins. It can be incorporated as an applet in any web page.

Unlike many visualizers, LiteMol can display extremely large structures containing millions of atoms quickly. Even structures such as virus capsids can be shown in a few seconds. The degree of detail can be adjusted from rather coarse (but fast) to very smooth (though slower).

LiteMol provides the standard functionality expected of a molecular visualizer such as different representations (cartoon, balls and sticks, Van der Waals spheres, surface, C-α trace), selecting substructures using a simple query language, coloring the parts of the structure etc.

Apart from the atomic models, LiteMol can be used to display electron densities (for X-ray crystallographic data) and cryo-EM data. The validation data from wwPDB validation reports (via the PDBe API) as well as annotation data from several databases are available and can be mapped to the 3D structure and shown as distinctive coloring.
Another feature of LiteMol is its extended interactivity. Interesting regions of the structure can be inspected in more detail by a single click. 

Data can be uploaded from a CIF file stored locally or downloaded directly from PDBe by entering the PDB ID. Larger structures can also be accessed efficiently using Coordinate Streaming, so the essential data are downloaded immediately and the rest of the data are fetched only when needed, limiting download sizes of files.