Dear all, We are proud to announce the release of Escher NG 1.0, freely downloadable at www.ddl.unimi.it ESCHER Next Generation (NG) is an enhanced version of the original ESCHER protein-protein automatic docking system developed in 1997 by Gabriele Ausiello, Gianni Cesareni and Manuela Helmer Citterich. The new release, with a reengineered code, includes some new features: - Protein-protein and DNA-protein docking capability. - Fast surface calculation based on the NSC algorithm. No external software are required. - Only two PDB files are required as input. - Parallel code. ESCHER NG is one of the first docking software that take full advantages of the multiprocessor hardware. Tested on two processor systems, ESCHER runs about 1.8 time faster than an equivalent single processor workstations (same CPU and same clock). These performances can be increased optimizing the code that was not originally developed to the parallel execution. ESCHER NG can run also on single processor systems in sequential mode. - Language localization. The Win32 version is included in the latest VEGA OpenGL package and in the full package we can find the source code and the executables for Win32, Irix6.2, Linux, AmigaOS. Best regards Giulio Vistoli and Alessandro Pedretti