MolView – Amazing molecular modelling website for Chemistry, Biochemistry and Biology.

MolView is an intuitive, Open-Source web-application to make science and education more awesome! It allows students and teachers to visualise different molecules structures and examine their properties. MolView is connected to numerous databases publicly available to provide the required data such as PubChem, ChemSpider, ChEMBL, DrugBank, the Crystallography Open Database.

The program is extremely easy to use and you can either create your own molecules or search the databases for known structures, both chemical and biological.

How I use MolView

Students can easily visualise molecules in 3 dimensions getting an appreciation of how the atoms are arranged spatially. When covering the IB/A Level topic relating to shapes of molecules, I give students a list of molecules and get them to predict the geometries, they then enter the molecular formula or names of the molecules into MolView and they can see how close their predictions are. Students can then use the measurements feature of the program or an old fashioned protractor to measure the angles between atoms and discover for themselves the molecular geometries.

Molview can also be used to describe several physical and chemical properties of the compound/molecule. Simply by clicking on the ‘Tools’ tab and then on information card to reveal information such as: appearance, molecular mass, chemical formula, electron donors/acceptors, percentage composition by element and systematic name.

MolVeiw can also be used to generate mass spectrometry and infrared spectroscopy data. This is an excellent tool for the organic analytical chemistry topics and has proved to be very useful, especially generating spectra of more complicated structures to challenge my most able students.