Biomolecules: Databanks, Visualization and Computations -Chime Howto

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Information on Chime

Chime is a plug-in viewer for several protein data base formats, such as pdb. It is owned and available free of charge from MDL
A nice indroduction can be found on the Chime Resources page by Eric Martz at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Information is also available at IMB-Jena
It is used on many protein resource pages, and also in connection with the Textbook "BIOCHEMISTRY" by J. Berg, L. Stryer and J. Tymoczko.
As a drawback, it is only available for certain operating systems (Windows and MacOS) and officially runs only in connection with certain browsers (Netscape 4.7x and some IE versions).The IE notoriously has problems showing many Chime pages properly. Note, that you can keep Netscape 4.7 installed on your system parallel to Netscape 7/8, Mozilla or Firefox. There are unofficial ways to run Chime with modern browsers:

Making Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape 7/8 Chime ready

Unofficially, there are methods to get Chime working with Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox and reportedly under Linux/Crossover! The only pages that I found not to work on neither Internet Explorer nor Netscape 7, Mozilla and Firefox are from the book BIOCHEMISTRY by J. Berg, L. Stryer and J. Tymoczko. These explicitly request Netscape 4.7x ! For installation, there are two methods decribed:

Method 1: Install Netscape 4.75 to 4.78 on your computer and then proceed to install MDL Chime. The installation finds Netscape automatically. This browser can coexist with your modern browser version, but you can also delete it after having gone through the installation. Go to the Netscape 4.7 browsers plug-in directory (for example 'c:\program files\netscape\communicator\program\plugins') and copy the files belonging to the Chime installation to the plugin directory of Mozilla or Firefox (for example 'c:\program files\mozilla Firefox\plugins'). These are:
chime.html
chime26.isu
npchime.dll
NPCHIME.ZIP
In case you have gotten these files from another computer or you wish to uninstall Netscape 4.7., you also have to include the file 'sculptapi.dll' into 'C:\WINDOWS\system32' after deinstallation of Netscape 4.7.

Method 2: The method is based on pretending of having a Netscape 4 installation while actually having Netscape 6/7 installed. One simply has to rename the browser-exe file for netscape 7 (netscp.exe) to netscape.exe. I tested the method for this configuration as described at the internet page below, but I do not know if it still works for Netscape 8, Mozilla or Firefox: http://www.cbi.cnptia.embrapa.br/SMS/STINGm/help/chime.html . This link also reports a method for getting Chime run under Linux by using the Crossover emulator.

Peter Schellenberg

15 Jun 2006