What background is required to run these tutorials?
These tutorials are meant to be used as supplementary
material, next to the text book. They add a third dimension
to the text by presenting 3D structures, and even a fourth
dimension by creating animations of reactions and of conformational
changes.
A few simple skills are required to run the tutorials.
The 3D structures and the animations are displayed automatically, using
the Chemscape Chime plug-in, or a Java applet.
To benefit from these tutorials, you should not only display the
material as presented, but expand it by creating your own structures
and animations.
A number of prepared input files will be made available. However, we hope
that you think of other conformations to be calculated. Which means you
have to modify one of the existing files, or create one from scratch.
In either case it is useful to understand:
- the z-matrix as a way to describe 3D structures
- the construction of the MOPAC input file
- how to perform mopac calculations and view the results
