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NSC

a "numerical recipe" for calculating surfaces, volumes and/or surface dots

Introduction

NSC is a "numerical recipe" for calculating

surface,
volume, and/or
surface dots

for an ensemble of an arbitray number of overlapping spheres defined by the coordinates of their centers and their radii. Both the coordinates and the radii are assumed to be given in the same length unit.

The program NSC is a piece of surface code written in C with an easy interface to any user program which requires as one of the tasks the calculation of surface, volume or surface dots. The user program simply includes "nsc.h" as header file and invokes the subroutine NSC.
Subsequently, "nsc.c" is compiled and linked with together with the user code.

In many molecular biological tasks, it is not the surface of a molecular ensemble per se which is necessary. In most cases, surface and volume data has to be calculated in a special user context. This is just the motivation for NSC.

NSC is included directly or in a modified form in

Whatif (G.Vriend)
DSSP (W.Kabsch and C.Sander)
Melc (A.Juffer)
STRIDE (A.Frishman)

Hopefully, NSC will fit your needs by easily enabling your program to calculate surfaces and volumes. Please contact the author if you have problems and difficulties, but also if you propose useful changes.

There is a page describing the methodology, the syntax and the usage of NSC

Downloading NSC

If you want to use NSC for private or academical purpose, you may download it here. Commercial users please contact in advance the author for a commercial user licence.

The file you get is 'tar'ed and compressed using the UNIX 'compress' utility.

The size of the compressed file is about 25 kB.

Uncompressing and unpacking it, a directory 'NSC.2' containing the C-source, a header file and the file readme.nsc with more informations will be created.

Click here, to download nsc2.tar.Z now.