Drew Berry, from The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Victoria, Australia, has tied for first prize in the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge conducted by the journal Science and the US National Science Foundation.

The prize was announced in September 2006 but the animation and supporting paper “Molecular Animation of Cell Death Mediated by the Fas Pathway” are now available on the web and in the April 2007 issue of Science. The description reads:

The movie shows the events from activation of the death receptor through degradation of the actin cytoskeleton using molecular representations based on the known crystal structures of the proteins or macromolecular structures involved in the process. The magnification at each stage is provided and represents cellular views at 5,000 and 8,000 and an intracellular or molecular view at 10,000,000 to visualize the proteins and molecular complexes. Readers are referred to the suggested reading list in the full text for the articles used to create the movie.

This movie would be useful in the context of a cell biology course, developmental biology course, or immunology course to illustrate the process of death receptor-mediated apoptosis. In addition, this movie could be used in a biochemistry course or structural biology course to illustrate the formation of macromolecular complexes involved in enzyme activation or signal transduction.

The biology is fascinating and Berry offers support for the biology in the ‘Suggested Reading’. I would also like to learn about his animation tools and computational methods for rendering the videos.

I may appear relaxed, though on the cellular level I’m quite busy.

Citation: D. Berry, Molecular Animation of Cell Death Mediated by the Fas Pathway. Sci. STKE 2007, tr1 (2007).

( Click here to access the paper. | Click here to play the movie.)