GPU-based Visualisation of Protein Secondary Structure

The increasing number of protein 3D structure information available makes the high-quality visualisation of this information play a more and more important role. Beside element-based representations the secondary-structurebased representation – also called cartoon representation – refers to a higher level of abstraction, representing the protein structure as tubes and ribbons. We present a method for this cartoon representation of proteins using the ability of modern graphics hardware’s geometry shaders and thus reducing the amount of data to be transferred from the CPU to the graphics card. The resulting minimisation of storage needed is of particular importance when dealing with huge datasets. High-quality images at interactive frame rates can thus be achieved.