Interactive 3D Molecules in articles
PLoS ONE launched a new collection titled “Structural Biology and Human Health: Medically Relevant Proteins from the SGC” which makes use of three dimensional molecular animation technology.
The SGC (a public-private partnership created to place 3D structures of proteins of medical relevance into the public domain) have been able to take the original research articles published in the Collection and create ‘enhanced’ versions of them. As a result each of the research articles is now also available as an ‘interactive’ version, incorporating user manipulable, three-dimensional molecular structures.
Readers of these enhanced articles first need to download a plug-in for their browser but are then able to click on hyperlinked text within the article to ‘fly’ to the relevant position within the molecule, and to interact with it at will (by zooming, rotating, animating, and exploring). The seamless integration of interactive 3D structures into the actual text of the article provides considerable new functionality for readers, and it is hoped it will lead to new insights and discoveries.
This technology is simmilar to the Proteopedia ongoing project which enables the annotation of structural data with online animation using the wiki and Jmol frameworks.
It seems that the prevalence of both methods would only go as far as the authors of newly published papers would invest time to create these beatiful, educating animations.
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Indeed you are correct – time needs to be invested to create these articles. However we’ve worked with Molsoft to implement the iSee concept in a way that the publication is integrated into the analysis.
So, instead of analysing in one (or more) softwares and then re-doing all the visualisations etc. in another format, every iSee datapack is created directly from the an analysis session. The researcher can annotate while s/he explores the structure and then when the analysis and annotation are done, these can be quickly published using two clicks to export a fully functional mini-webpage).
If only there were such two clicks to re-format the paper to the journal guidelines and another two clicks to pass the review…
Sound easy enough though. Thanks Wen!
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