Published by Nanome Inc.
1. UCSD’s Professor Zoran Radic, Principal Investigator on NIH-funded protein structure research, says that “looking at [protein] complexes in VR yields much more immediately obvious conclusions than any other kinds of visualization.” Within moments of entering VR, many of Professor Radic’s crystallographer colleagues develop new insights and understandings into their own structures.
2. The paper, titled “Development of a virtual reality platform for effective communication of structural data in drug discovery”, discusses how the immersive nature of virtual reality can help scientists better understand the nuances and features of molecular structures.
3. The goal is to reduce the time required to thoroughly understand the spatial and structural properties of protein complexes and drug-target binding sites through more effective communication between structural biologists, chemists, and discovery scientists from various disciplines while enhancing idea flow, creativity, and cross-site collaborations within drug-discovery teams.
4. Today, researchers have utilized X-ray crystallography to map over 13,000 macromolecule structures — if you have ever looked at a representation of a protein, the data behind it was probably created by a crystallographer (with a powerful X-ray blaster).
5. To suit the needs of engineers and students working with crystal structures and improve the efficiency their workflow, more powerful and intuitive tools are necessary.
6. Given the versatility and importance of crystals, crystallography is a most important field of modern research, essential to the study and engineering of nanoscale systems.
7. It enables everyone from students to professional engineers to improve their intuition and develop new insights into nanoscale phenomena and molecular systems.
8. We are excited to announce that we have been collaborating with The Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) and have co-authored a paper that is being published in the Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling.
9. Build your own molecular structures out of thin air, explore the intricacies of a DNA strand or understand what medicine looks like at the molecular level.
10. This leads us to ponder the insights and value Nanome could bring to crystallographers involved in non-protein fields of research like piezoelectronics.
11. Nanome is a collaborative molecular design platform in Virtual Reality.