Marvin v Alchemy v PyMOL

I'm a Biomedical Science student at King's and the university provides Alchemy and PyMOL as software solutions for drawing chemical structures and examining various properties such as torsion angles. I'm finding these programs a little unintuitive and, dare I say it, clunky. I've used Marvin before at school just for fun really, but was very impressed by the easy to use interface. Does anyone have experience with Alchemy and/or PyMOL and could give their opinion against Marvin's suite?

 

I understand the template library for Marvin is pretty big and will suffice admirably well for my course purposes looking through our computer based tasks ahead. And I can open the same file formats as I could with Alcehmy or PyMOL. Is that all right?

Hi,

Unfortunatelly we do not have as much experience with Alchemy or PyMol as we need to give you a comparison of the features.

What i can tell is that Marvin supports most of the chemical file formats, can open images with the help of OSRA, can process pdf files for IUPAC and traditional chemical names, and with the help of OSRA for also images. Have various chemical calculations, and representation capabilities. We also have tools for dealing with reactions.

We have lots of Academic users, and they use our software in the classes and also in student examinations, so i could say that the Chemaxon suite is good in areas related to chemical studies. But i know less about the other tools to just simply say, Marvin or other Chemaxon tools can replace them fully, and because Alchemy and PyMol are the used and known softwares in your Univeristy, i assume there are tasks that are designed for the knowledge of that tools, so i can only encourage you to use our software to make things easier for yourself.

I hope this helps a bit.

Regards,
Istvan

Ah OK. I guess I'll just play around with all of them and check that, for my University purposes, they will accomplish the same tasks.

As Marvin's freeware for the most part I'll keep a copy on my laptop anyway. At any rate it saves me having to bring my massive MolyMod kit from home. <-- That would take up a fair bit of space.

Hi,

i hope you will enjoy our softwares, and i encurage you to share your experiences if you have time and mood to do that.

Thanks, and best regards,
Istvan