At the end of 2018, Paul Smith & Mateusz Bieniek applied for and were awarded the Warren L. DeLano Memorial PyMOL Open-Source Fellowship. (Congratulations Paul & Mat!) They were the first ‘team’ to be awarded this fellowship, which is “awarded by Schrödinger to supplement the income of an outstanding member of the PyMOL open-source community so that s/he can continue to develop free resources to help scientific progress and the community as a whole.” In their Fellowship application, Paul & Mat proposed to integrate the MDAnalysis platform into PyMOL. In doing so, they planned to (i) develop a method to reduce the memory footprint of PyMOL when visualising and analysing trajectories from large-scale molecular dynamics simulations; (ii) expand the range of analysis tools that can directly be accessed within PyMOL; and (iii) to do their part to continue to grow the open-source community that supports PyMOL. As their Fellowship runs through October 2019, Paul and Mat will be reporting their progress towards these goals, and the outputs that result from their work in this blog over the coming months. I am very excited to see the results of this fellowship, as I think several useful tools for the molecular dynamics simulation community will be produced.
Later this week, Paul & Mat will publish their first post summarising the work they have done to date toward the first of their objectives.