The three-dimensional molecular graphic depicting the astaxanthin molecule was generated with the program RasMol, version 2.6 for Windows (R. A. Sayle and E. J. Milner-White. (1995) RasMol: Biomolecular graphics for all. Trends Biochem. Sci., 20(9):374-376). RasMol is the creation of Dr. Roger A. Sayle, through whose generosity RasMol is completely in the public domain and free for all users.

The current best link for RasMol resources in the United States is hosted at the National Science Foundation-supported RasMol website at the University of Massachussetts.

The three-dimensional atomic coordinates used for RasMol were created by the programme CORINA (Gasteiger, J., Rudolph, C., and Sadowski, J. (1990) Automatic generation of 3D-atomic coordinates for organic molecules. Tetrahedron Comp. Method., 3:537-547; Sadowski, J. and Gasteiger, J. (1993) From atoms and bonds to three-dimensional atomic coordinates: automatic model builders. Chem. Rev., 93:2567-2581), developed by Prof. Dr. Johann Gasteiger's research group at the Institut für Organische Chemie, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.

The CORINA home page is at:
http://www2.ccc.uni-erlangen.de/software/corina/corina.html.