Biomachina News Room

Thirteen leading undergraduate students from across the nation spent an informative afternoon at the School of Health Information Sciences (SHIS) 3D Visualization Facility. Supported by competitive awards from the Undergraduate Research Training Program (URTP) of the W. M. Keck Center for Computational and Structural Biology, the students are visiting Houston for the summer to participate in computational biology research under the guidance of a faculty mentor of their choosing. During the summer session, trainees attend a specially-tailored program of presentations designed to introduce them to a broad spectrum of subdisciplines of computational biology (such as 3D electron crystallography, molecular dynamics, or sequence analysis), workshops, and specially designed tours of research and clinical facilities in the Texas Medical Center, such as the 3D Visualization Facility. The facility was recently built at SHIS by Keck postdoctoral fellow Stefan Birmanns, Ph.D. in the Laboratory for Structural Bioinformatics directed by Willy Wriggers, Ph.D.

During their visit on Friday, June 25, 2004, the students explored in-house developed virtual reality (VR) applications for scientific datasets calculated by simulation or acquired by experiment. The VR system consists of two InFocus LP530 DLP projectors that are used with polarization filters and inexpensive glasses to support passive stereoscopic viewing. The students experienced an intuitive and natural interaction with the virtual structures with a Polhemus Fastrak magnetic tracking system and a SensAble Technologies 1.5/6DOF Phantom haptic device that provides force and torque feedback. The main application area of the facility in the Laboratory for Structural Bioinformatics is the modeling and 3D structure determination of large sub-cellular biological machines.

Figure: From left to right: 3D visualization expert Stefan Birmanns, Ph.D., 13 URTP summer students (wearing stereoscopic glasses), URTP coordinator Lisa Blinn, laboratory director and URTP committee member Willy Wriggers, Ph.D.