How do scientists decide how to best represent an image in order to communicate its importance most effectively?
Dr. Ferrin: What’s best for answering one scientific question is not necessarily best for another question. For example, if you’re interested in the overall organization of proteins within a virus, the animation shown here is quite effective. But if you’re interested in why a particular protein within the virus forms trimeric units, then you’ll want to focus in on the protein-protein interface, fit the crystal structure of the protein, if available, to the electron density map, and try to determine just what amino acid residues within the protein are responsible for the underlying hydrogen binding. So it’s scientific curiosity and inquiry that drives the visualization of the data. The beauty of an interactive and feature-rich application like Chimera is that you can quickly try different approaches to visualizing data — in this case complex biological structure data.
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