People that work in Scientific & Information Visualization are constantly being pushed by people unfamiliar with the field to justify why their work is important. Well, a new study from the University of Illinois shows how a good visualization package was essential in identifying the signaling pathways in protein-RNA complexes, keys to the genetic code of all organisms.
“With our visualization software we also can overlap the optimal paths from different proteins and compare networks ” Luthey-Schulten said. “The ability to rapidly visualize and compute the networks will accelerate the design efforts to expand the genetic code to include novel amino acids and allow researchers to apply the technique to much larger systems like the ribosome.”
The software they developed and used is VMD, and they offer it freely on their website.
via Signaling Networks That Set Up Genetic Code.
