From the Jmol mailing list, I noticed Jmol 14.4.0 was released yesterday (October 13, 2015) by Dr. Bob Hanson. Among the development highlights is the following item:

biomolecule annotations including DSSR, RNA3D, EBI sequence domains, and PDB validation data

I am glad to see that DSSR has been integrated into Jmol, one of the most popular molecular graphics visualization programs. To enable easy access to the DSSR functionality from Jmol, I’ve set up two websites with easy-to-remember URLs: http://jmol.x3dna.org and http://jsmol.x3dna.org. They both point to the same jsmol/ folder extracted from jsmol.zip of the Jmol distribution.

In retrospect, I first met Bob at the Workshop on the PDBx/mmCIF Data Exchange Format for Structural Biology held at Rutgers University during October 21-22, 2013. I approached him during a lunch break, asking for a possible collaboration on integrating DSSR into Jmol. The name DSSR may have played a role in convincing Bob, since it matches the well-known DSSP program for proteins. In the end, we were both excited about the project, talked into details after the meeting, and continued our conversation the next morning while I drove him to the airport.

Nothing real happened until early April 2014. Once getting started, however, we moved forward rapidly: it took less then three weeks to get the first functional version ready for the community to play. See Bob’s announcement RNA/DNA Secondary Structure, anyone? in the Jmol mailing list on April 9, 2014. During this process, we communicated extensively via email, up to 30 messages per day, on technical details for better communication between the two programs. The integration works by using Jmol as a front-end, which calls a web-serivce hosted at Columbia University for DSSR analysis. Jmol’s parsing of the DSSR output is facilitated by the dedicated --jmol option.

The above preliminary, yet functional, DSSR-Jmol integration had be in service without infrastructural changes until two months ago. In August 10, 2015, Bob contacted me:

I might make a significant request though. That would be for the server to deliver all this in JSON format. This is really the way to go. It is what people want and it is perfect for Jmol as well.

I’d played around with JSON or SQLite as a structured data exchange format for quite some time, and Bob’s request finally convinced me that JSON is the (better) way to go. And that began another around of intensive collaborative work that has switched the exchange format between DSSR and Jmol from plain text output to JSON. From August 10 to September 22, we had a total of over 170-email exchanges, plus Skype. JSON has really simplified lives of both parties, especially in the long run.

Overall, collaborating with Bob has been truly an enjoyable and rewarding experience. The DSSR-Jmol integration also serves as a concrete example of what can be achieved by two dedicated minds with complementary expertise.