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Turning a Killer Virus into Award-Winning Art [Video]

Because sometimes a computer model simply doesn't show the richness of structure in the microbiological universe

Ebola Virus Proteins

Credit:

By David Goodsell (RCSB PDB Molecule of the Month). Via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 3.0 license 

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


David Goodsell, an artist and Scripps Research Institute professor of molecular biology, won the 2016 Wellcome Image Awards for his hand-painted watercolor depiction of the Ebola virus. Goodsell says that sometimes computer models fail to tell us what we want to know about complex structures. In this video he describes the problem and how he chose to paint the biological world the way he paints it. He is now illustrating molecules for the RCSB Protein Data Bank.

 


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Eliene Augenbraun is a multimedia science producer, formerly Nature Research's Multimedia Managing Editor and Scientific American's senior video producer. Before that, she founded and ran ScienCentral, an award-winning news service providing ABC and NBC with science news stories. She has a PhD in Biology.

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