Here is a new visualization of the cell cycle using a combination of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), Flash, and database-driven graphics. This new version from Chris Landau and Jamie Cope’s nformation design demonstrates the yeast cell cycle in 3D cycle stages along with educational information about the process.
Try zooming in and see changes in the nucleus as the cycle progresses.
Yeast Cell Nucleus During Metaphase
This project started as a collaboration at the University of Michigan with Anuj Kumar’s lab in the Life Sciences Institute and first led to the OrganelleView project.
Here is a sketch I made showing the locations and extent of intellectual property claims on 22 chromosomes and the X and Y. These data are from 2005. The extent is larger today.
I’m leading a lab this semester where two groups are developing new and interesting models for user interfaces and interactive experiences. One of the groups is looking at toys as a model for engaging intimately with science. The other day, we started thinking about toys as knowledge-networks and what that might mean for the design of interactive, tactile systems.
They’ve been using SCRATCH as a platform for development, but they’ve also been moving beyond. The team identified a few core values that they hoped to embody in the toys:
1. Astonishment 2. Play/ Tactile/ Haptic 3. Access 4. Information – Knowledge 5. Relatedness of things 6. Engagement – Belonging
I ran across this today while searching for some mitochondrial gene information. It’s the MitoWheel (re:blogged via pimm). Gábor Zsurka, a mitochondrial geneticist, produced it in flash with actionscript.
…. Because documents are simply points on the map, it is possible for ThemeScape to show thousands of documents at once without overwhelming the user. Zooming into the map reveals greater detail. For any region on the map, a click of the mouse pops up a list of documents with related content. Pointing to any document title displays a short text summary. A mouse click links the user directly to the original document…..
http://www.pnl.gov/news/1995/nws95-07.htm
In Themescape, themes in the documents are layered and appear on the computer screen as a relief map of natural terrain. The mountains in Themescape indicate where themes are concentrated in the underlying documents; and their shapes — a broad butte or a high pinnacle — reflect how the thematic information is distributed and related across documents.
The transdisciplinary project “I Gene Visions” of the Cologne artist and researcher Karsten K. Panzer PerZan is developing a visionary grammar of science and the arts, of biology and the esthetics. PerZan creates a connecting and binding meta-language between the binary codes of the genetic DNA and the archaic Chinese opus “Yijing”, Book of Changes, by using a binary color system (FR 64) as a mediator and transmitter www.PerZan.de.
The collaborative work of graduate student Gabriel Harp and Chris Landau (MFA ’06) on the Organelle View project was published in the January issue of Nucleic Acids Research.
“The project makes a gigantic leap in the distribution of biological data–moving it beyond the conventional representations of names and numbers to embrace the visual and organismal aspects of cellular and molecular forms”, says Harp.
“Organelle View is a scientific visualization application allowing users to dynamically generate a visual interpretation of data from Organelle DB. Organelle View presents a searchable interface with a three-dimensional representation of an archetypical cell. Rather than representing organelles and subcellular structures by text, Organelle View offers an artist’s rendering of a cell and its major organelles. At present, we have chosen a budding yeast cell (S.cerevisiae) as the model for Organelle View, largely because protein localization has been studied quite extensively in yeast; future versions of Organelle View will incorporate additional cell types from other organisms.”
(Wiwatwattana, N., Landau, C.M., Cope, G.J., Harp, G.A., & Kumar, A. (2007). Organelle DB: an updated resource of eukaryotic protein localization and function. Nucleic Acids Research, 35, D810-D814.)
