Sonification for Structural Biology and Structure-based Drug Design

The visualisation of structural biology data can be quite challenging as the datasets are complex, in particular the intrinsic dynamics/flexibility. Therefore some researchers have looked into the use of sonification for the display of proteins. Combining sonification and visualisation appears to be well fitted to this problem, but at the time of writing there were no plugins available for any of the major molecular visualisation applications. Therefore, we set out to develop a sonification plugin for one of those applications, released as open-source software, in order to facilitate scrutiny and evaluation from as many parties as possible. Our open source sonification plugin was developed for UCSF Chimera in collaboration with medicinal chemists and structural biologists. We determined two tasks that we deemed were not well represented visually and developed sonifications for them. Furthermore, we extended a general-purpose Chimera tool to map attributes of protein residues to pitch.

Details can be found in the publications below.

Publications related to this project

A journal article is currently undergoing peer review.

• Ballweg, H., Bronowska, A. K., & Vickers, P. (2016). Interactive Sonification for Structural Biology and Structure-based Drug Design. In T. Hermann, R. Bresin, & J. Yang (Eds.), ISon 2016, 5th Interactive Sonification Workshop (pp. 41–47). Bielefeld, Germany: CITEC, Bielefeld University.
  Bib Entry

  • @inproceedings{Ballweg:2016,
      address = {Bielefeld, Germany},
      author = {Ballweg, Holger and Bronowska, Agnieszka K and Vickers, Paul},
      booktitle = {ISon 2016, 5th Interactive Sonification Workshop},
      editor = {Hermann, Thomas and Bresin, Roberto and Yang, Jiajun},
      pages = {41--47},
      pdf = {http://cis.northumbria.ac.uk/staff/cgpv1/downloadables/Ballweg2016.pdf},
      publisher = {CITEC, Bielefeld University},
      title = {Interactive Sonification for Structural Biology and Structure-based Drug Design},
      url = {https://bit.ly/2NX356V},
      year = {2016}
    }
    

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