I love Goodsell’s paintings too: they make the molecular world feel simultaneously beautiful, crowded, wonderfully strange, and colorfully tasty.
This reminded me of Tim Davison’s LifeBrush, an interactive VR painting and simulation system explicitly inspired by Goodsell’s illustrations.
In his thesis, Davison describes using it to "structurally recreate, simulate and step inside" famous Goodsell illustrations -- the cytoskeleton demo is a striking example of a painting becoming a world you can enter and set in motion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CsxADBpal0
https://hdl.handle.net/1880/111493
I first called LifeBrush "Emacs for Cytoplasm" in a Boids thread and asked Davison whether the molecular motion was slowed down. He replied that medium-sized proteins move around 5 m/s, and that LifeBrush deliberately slows and smooths Brownian motion for illustration. The code was open source; at the time it required a VR headset and had a clunky, research-grade interface.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715199
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22724602
https://github.com/timdecode/LifeBrush
The interaction is the magic: in the overview, a ribosome moves along mRNA as tRNA brings amino acids and a polypeptide chain grows. You can grab the ribosome and move it where you want, rather than wait for Brownian motion.
I described it as dragging the ribosome’s "lazy ass" through "tRNA pasta and mRNA meatballs." It’s a scientific illustration you can play with, not a literal molecular-dynamics visualization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBHRyGxLGI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=624F5iaCKco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L482dpH9S8o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUnTEI9QZPE
Davison’s work has since grown into CellWalk, a guided, interactive tour through a bacterial cell, from the whole cell down to its atoms, for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro.
And here the Goodsell connection is even more direct: Davison’s site credits David Goodsell, Ludovic Autin, and Martina Maritan with the CellWalk model and tour, based on their whole-cell paper. Davison is now CEO and cofounder of Ako Biotica, the company behind CellWalk.
https://timd.ca/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8DOAPPjMw0
https://cellwalk.ca/
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2021.167351
LifeBrush papers: the 2018 conference paper, followed by the 2019 Computers & Graphics article on painting, simulating, and visualizing dense biomolecular environments.
https://doi.org/10.1109/CW.2018.00017
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2019.05.006
This reminded me of Tim Davison’s LifeBrush, an interactive VR painting and simulation system explicitly inspired by Goodsell’s illustrations.
In his thesis, Davison describes using it to "structurally recreate, simulate and step inside" famous Goodsell illustrations -- the cytoskeleton demo is a striking example of a painting becoming a world you can enter and set in motion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CsxADBpal0
https://hdl.handle.net/1880/111493
I first called LifeBrush "Emacs for Cytoplasm" in a Boids thread and asked Davison whether the molecular motion was slowed down. He replied that medium-sized proteins move around 5 m/s, and that LifeBrush deliberately slows and smooths Brownian motion for illustration. The code was open source; at the time it required a VR headset and had a clunky, research-grade interface.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715199
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22724602
https://github.com/timdecode/LifeBrush
The interaction is the magic: in the overview, a ribosome moves along mRNA as tRNA brings amino acids and a polypeptide chain grows. You can grab the ribosome and move it where you want, rather than wait for Brownian motion.
I described it as dragging the ribosome’s "lazy ass" through "tRNA pasta and mRNA meatballs." It’s a scientific illustration you can play with, not a literal molecular-dynamics visualization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBHRyGxLGI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=624F5iaCKco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L482dpH9S8o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUnTEI9QZPE
Davison’s work has since grown into CellWalk, a guided, interactive tour through a bacterial cell, from the whole cell down to its atoms, for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro.
And here the Goodsell connection is even more direct: Davison’s site credits David Goodsell, Ludovic Autin, and Martina Maritan with the CellWalk model and tour, based on their whole-cell paper. Davison is now CEO and cofounder of Ako Biotica, the company behind CellWalk.
https://timd.ca/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8DOAPPjMw0
https://cellwalk.ca/
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2021.167351
LifeBrush papers: the 2018 conference paper, followed by the 2019 Computers & Graphics article on painting, simulating, and visualizing dense biomolecular environments.
https://doi.org/10.1109/CW.2018.00017
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2019.05.006