Abstract
Visualization of molecular structures is one of the most common tasks carried out by structural biologists, yet the technical details and advances required to e ciently display molecular structures are often hidden from the end user. During decades molecular viewer software such as Chimera, COOT, PyMOL, or VMD provided the most common solutions to quickly visualize structures. Nowadays, new and e cient ways to depict molecular objects are changing how structural biologists interact with their data. Such novelties are often driven by advances made by computer scientists, but an important gap remains between this community and the final users such as structural and computational biologists. In this perspective article, we clarify how developments from computer graphics and data visualization have led to novel ways of understanding protein structure. We present future developments from computer science that will be beneficial for structural biology. By pointing to canonical papers and explaining technical progress underlying new graphical developments in simple terms, we hope to promote communication between the di↵erent communities to shape future developments in molecular graphics.