A Little Perspective

Imagine strolling along the surface of a single cell from your body. Protruding structures tower over you like trees in a forest, helping you learn their biological form and function, like a child on a guided nature walk. Creating this experience, or a virtual version of it, is the goal of a new tool called Nanoscape. Our detailed understanding of structural cellular biology has enabled an explosion of digital renderings in recent years. But aligning scientific data with aesthetically functional and impactful images is not straightforward. This approach combines data from many sources to create as accurate a representation as possible without sacrificing the visualisations’ aesthetic appeal (pictured, well-known cell-surface markers above, then placed on a virtual sphere to approximate a cell surface environment). Immersive representations like this articulate intricate complexities of biology, both for education and for those seeking to answer fundamental questions about how microscopic dynamics underpin life.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image adapted from work by Shereen R Kadir and colleagues
• 3D Visualisation Aesthetics Lab, School of Art and Design, and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Convergent Bio-Nano Science and Technology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, June 2021