Last weekend, I attended a session from TEDxWellesleyCollege and was able to listen to Janet Iwasa, a fellow biochemist, along with a few other amazing speakers. Janet Iwasa is a molecular animator, and works to create scientifically accurate animations in order to visualize cellular and molecular processes for communication between scientists and to the general public, and also as a way of interpreting large datasets in a more understandable way. I thought you all might especially appreciate her animations of hemoglobin alternating from an oxygenated to deoxygenated form!
http://biochem.web.utah.edu/iwasa/projects/hemoglobin.html
While PyMOL is great for visualizing proteins, it doesn’t allow us to visualize changing protein conformations the way these animations do.
That’s really amazing! I was actually just playing around with PyMOL for my post and wishing I could do something like that.