Science Cover with ePMV

Post date: Apr 25, 2011 11:15:30 PM

Graham Johnson used ePMV to help generate this image of dynein walking along a microtubule for Andrew Carter, Carol Cho, Lan Jin, and Ron Vale that was used on the March 4, 2011 issue of Science. Carter provided a theoretical conformation of the PDB file with one motor bound to a short microtubule protofilament. Johnson fit that structure onto a generic 13 protofilament microtubule generated efficiently with MoGraph instances in Cinema 4D. The MoGraph microtubules in this image track along a pair of splines with thousands of repeats of a single helical turn of tubulin dimers and random interjections of the bound dynein structures to sparsely decorate the microtubules. A coarse molecular surface generated with a fairly dense grid (70) easily creates a clear outline (not distractingly busy) of one subunit in blue, while simultaneously revealing the crystal structure beneath.

More information can be found at the Science website:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6021.toc