![]() 'Anyone is now able to look at proteins important for medicine in 3D and move them around as they wish whilst reading about what they are looking at. 'It's like directing your own movie to reveal what you want to see,' says Dr Brian Marsden of the SGC at the University of Oxford. The functionality, whereby the text of an academic article is tightly integrated with an animated and interactive molecular structure, provides an entirely new and enhanced experience with a significant "wow" factor. Readers of these enhanced articles will first need to download a free plug-in for their browser but will then be able to click on hyperlinked text within the article to 'fly' to the relevant position within the molecule, and to then interact with it at will (by zooming, rotating and exploring). These peer-reviewed articles, which include some of the research highlights from the SGC, describe new protein structures, including a protein involved in the survival and proliferation of cancer cells, a protein associated with hereditary paraplegia, and a protein involved in degrading foreign compounds and pollutants in the body. This represents the start of a new PLoS ONE collection entitled "Structural Biology and Human Health: Medically Relevant Proteins from the SGC" (also known as the 'Structural Genomics Consortium'). On October 20th 2009, PLoS ONE will feature an impressive new 3D molecular animation technology on five newly published articles. Below is the press release on the subject from PLoS ONE: You can check out the first JBC paper incorporating the interactive images here, and a collection of papers in PLos ONE incorporating the images here. Still, this is a good idea, and I imagine that the experience will be improved over time. Ostensibly, this new functionality will save readers time and enhance their understanding by letting them explore these structures, but starting with the important features already highlighted.Īfter a quick look at these new interactive 3D images, though, I have to admit that I'm finding the experience slightly cumbersome. So, scientists go through great pains to represent important features of their structures in 2D images for publication. However, making sense of something as complex as a protein structure can require quite a bit of analysis. ![]() ![]() The atomic coordinates of all published biomolecular structures have been available for some time at the Protein Data Bank. Late last week, I received emails from two journals ( The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) and PLoS ONE) indicating that they are now incorporating interactive 3D images of molecular structures in their papers.
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