This page is designed to assist you in learning to recognize symmetry elements within molecules. Clicking on the name of a molecule will bring up a page listing the molecule and some (but not all) of the symmetry elements of that molecule. I would suggest that you first look at the molecule and see if you can identify the symmetry elements listed. Then click on the individual symmetry elements to see that element in 3-D. If an element is listed several times you should identify several distinct occurances of that type of symmetry element.

These pages require that your browser is configured to read VRML pages (.wrl and .wrz files). One suitable plug-in is the Cortona VRML Client (available here for PC and Mac). Our experience is that Internet Explorer (5.x) and Netscape (4.7x) both work well with this plug-in on the PC platfom, but Netscape does not work well with it on the Mac platform.

I would like to thank Joanna Wolkowski, Heather Burnett and Abigail Cullinan for their hard work in generating most of the graphics used here.