Representation of non covalent bonds:

Non covalent bond rep.

The classical method to represent non-covalent bonds is to visualize them as lines or cylinders. An important shortcoming of these representations is that they do not provide any clue about the interaction strength, but depict such bonds in a binary 'all or nothing' fashion.

Using hyperboloids, it is possible to continuously tune a single parameter of the HyperBalls representation in order to change the appearance of these primitives as a function of the distance between atoms or molecules (see figure above). Actually, any other factor such as bond strength or energy could be used as well. This possibility is particularly useful to follow the evolution of non-covalent bonds over time to better understand the formation of this type of interaction.

Videos about non covalent bond evolution are available in the Videos section.