Molecule World

A fun thing we can do with molecular models is to create art. In Molecule World™ , the residue coloring option applies a different color to each amino acid and nucleotide. When we're characterizing a protein and trying to understand its function, the residue coloring option helps us identify repetitive or unusual amino acid sequences, but we can also use this coloring option to have fun.

The video at the end shows all the steps put together.

1. Find and download a spherical protein structure. ... Read more

We created the structure collection feature in Molecule World because I knew it would be useful in teaching my courses. A request from the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota taught us structure collections could be useful in other ways, too.

The Weisman Art Museum collaborated with neuroscientists at the University of Minnesota and Ricardo Martinez Murillo, a neuroscientist in Spain, to produce the traveling Beautiful Brain exhibit featuring the drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Cajal is considered the father ... Read more

A few years ago, when the iPhone first came out, I fell in love with an app called "Molecules." It was easy to use, the images were lovely, and I thought manipulating molecules by touch could help solve some of the problems my students had with using Cn3D.

I was all set to switch.

But I couldn't. When it came to teaching, I needed features that Molecules just didn't have.

To make a long story short, we had an SBIR grant from National Science Foundation and the good fortune to work with Molecules' developer and another brilliant ... Read more

It's well understood in science education that students are more engaged when they work on problems that matter. Right now, Zika virus matters. Zika is a very scary problem that matters a great deal to anyone who might want to start a family and greatly concerns my students. I teach a bioinformatics course where students use computational tools to research biology. Since my students are learning how to use tools that can be applied to this problem, I decided to have them apply their new bioinformatics skills to identify drugs that work against Zika virus. We don't have the lab facilities ... Read more