It’s confession time: A whole lot of cartoons get watched on the tube in my household. And apart from the overgrown variety, there are absolutely no children involved. So it may be the case that I’m feeling a little bit of vindication at the news of animation technologies playing a key role in furthering our reach of knowledge in cell science.
Nature reports that scientists are relying on precisely the same three-dimensional animation software tools employed to the delight of millions by the folks at Pixar and other animation studios to model and understand cellular-scale mechanisms and behaviors.
Because market leader Maya by AutoDesk was not designed to easily accommodate and manipulate the types of data that scientists work with as opposed to those of artists and designers, some modifications were in order. Enter the Molecular Maya Toolkit. It’s a free software kit that harnesses the visual modeling power of the software that is designed especially with the molecular sciences in mind.
As spelled out by the Nature article, researchers are bringing the digital modeling toolkit to bear on a range of very small scale inquiries that are otherwise extremely difficult to describe or simulate. Examples of successful application of the technique include depiction of how proteins pass through cell membranes and various behaviors of harmful bacteria such as E. coli.
Photo courtesy of ArielGold, via Wikimedia Commons
