When it comes to the complex endeavors carried out by professionals in the biochemical sector, working with proprietary pieces of software involves assuming the risk of its development company shutting down, thus depriving entire laboratories of crucial updates that can no longer be picked up by a different programming team.

With this in mind, if your line of work focuses on processing X-ray data for the purpose of modelling protein chains at a molecular level on hardware running the Windows operating system, WinCoot’s openly available source code, impressive list of features and constant stream of updates may be the right choice for your research department.

The Crystallographic Object-Oriented Toolkit at hand lets users inspect protein models on a three-dimensional canvas capable of measuring differences and distances between molecular bonds for simulating further development scenarios and possible mutations down to the most minute details.

In terms of tools, users have the ability to perform geometry, temperature and density fit analyses for the creation of highly detailed reports of the target data, while the Ligand builder can instantly apply changes made to the model. Finally, apart from molecules themselves being able to be merged for further study of interactions, users may also take screenshots of the current model structure to make future comparisons with mutated variants.