A very fast program for visualizing protein surfaces, channels and cavities

A method for visualizing molecular surfaces is described that uses a grid to store the distance to the nearest atom. Using on-the-fly three-dimensional (3D) contouring of a molecular graphics program such as FRODO, one can obtain a good impression of van der Waals surfaces and solvent-accessible surfaces. The main advantages of the method described here are its high speed and the fact that no recalculations need to be done to obtain the solvent-accessible surface visualized for a probe with another radius