A new way for scientists to interact with and understand the structure of
important biological molecules critical to human health is now available. Called
iSee, it’s now possible to interactively fly over, zoom into and dive through 3D
visualisations of these molecules in atomic detail.
 
iSee has been developed in a collaboration between the SGC and MolSoft LLC
and forms a key part of the SGC’s ‘open access’ science philosophy to make its
data freely available to all and to provide it in a manner which maximises the
accessibility and understanding for researchers in all fields. 
 
The iSee platform is now also a core part of a collection of peer-reviewed
publications detailing research highlights from the SGC. This collection,
published in the online journal PLoS ONE on October 20th 2009 and entitled
“Structural Biology and Human Health: Medically Relevant Proteins from the
SGC”, includes a protein involved in the survival and proliferation of cancer cells,
a protein associated with hereditary paraplegia, and a protein involved in
degrading foreign compounds and pollutants in the body.
See the full library at the Structural Genomics Consortium website
The SGC is a public-private partnership based at the University of Oxford, the
University of Toronto, Canada and the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden and is
dedicated to finding the structures of human proteins of medical relevance which
could be targets for new drugs 
 
The PLoS ONE iSee collection represents a breakthrough in publishing, moving
away from a static and flat 2D set of images towards an intuitive and interactive
3D experience. This is made possible through a freely-available plug-in for web
browsers from MolSoft which allow readers to click on hyperlinks within the text
of the articles causing the visualisation of the structures to change to reflect the
context of the text. The SGC has over 500 datapacks already available over the
web and plan to publish a significant number of academic papers incorporating
these datapacks over the next four years with PLoS ONE.
 
‘If a picture is worth a thousand words, an interactive 3D image is worth
considerably more’ says Dr Wen Hwa Lee, Senior Scientist in Research
Informatics at the SGC. ‘iSee provides a quantum leap forward over the 500-
year-old technology of static images in printed journals.’
 
Details of the iSee plug-in
The web plug-in technology used by iSee, known as activeICM (http://www.molsoft.com/activeicm.html)
has been developed by Molsoft LLC to allow molecular documents to be embedded within a web page.
Patent pending.
 
 

http://www.plosone.org/article/browseIssue.action?issue=info:doi/10.1371...