Sculptor

Sculptor is an integrated visualization-and-modeling software system for interactive analysis of multiscale structural biology datasets, combining GPU-accelerated, special-purpose molecular graphics with quantitative molecular modeling algorithms for fitting atomic components into intermediate- to low-resolution volumetric maps (e.g., cryo-EM reconstructions). By coupling real-time visualization with docking and refinement methods, Sculptor supports rapid inspection, post-processing, and integration of results from external tools, while lowering the practical barrier to applying algorithmic modeling workflows.

A core capability is interactive exploration of docking “score landscapes” produced by the colores component of Situs: users can perform expert-guided peak selection and sequential placement of components, which is particularly useful when automatic peak picking is unreliable due to low resolution or ambiguous density. For refinement, Sculptor (in conjunction with Situs) implements simultaneous multi-body docking that optimizes placements of multiple components jointly, softly enforcing shape complementarity via normalization of the cross-correlation coefficient. This integrated workflow is intended to improve robustness and accuracy for challenging assemblies where density features are weak, anisotropic, or confounded by artifacts or heterogeneity, and is distributed with Situs (v2.6) and Sculptor (v2.0).