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.