Paintings, Cartoons Combine to Render Biological Molecules

During the annual ACA meeting, David Goodsell, of Scripps Research and RCSB Protein Data Bank, will discuss his use of artistic methods to visualize biological data. His presentation, “Art as a Tool for Structural Biology,” takes place Tuesday. Traditional artistic mediums, like painting, provide the freedom necessary to illustrate cells, and Goodsell is using illustrations to lay the foundation for computational modeling of whole cells. He also creates brightly colored, cartoonlike graphics with nonphotorealistic computer graphics methods to highlight the overall shape of molecules and how they assemble and interact.

Improving Yields in Enhanced Oil Recovery

Nonionic surfactants are molecules with both hydrophobic and hydrophilic components, which lets them interact both with hydrophilic liquids like water as well as hydrophobic liquids like oil. This surface-active property makes them invaluable in enhanced oil recovery, where they can be used to greatly increase oil yields. During the 72nd ACA meeting, Thomas Fitzgibbons, of Dow, will detail how nonionic surfactants behave under the high-pressure conditions found in oil wells; adding nonionic surfactants to the injection fluid can help in several ways.