BioBlender: Blender for Biologists

I have always admired Blender in general, and interfacing it it to load molecular structures like this is genius. I hope it's the first of many such explorations. Although I'm not a biologist this is cool enough that I would install blender again just to have fun with making neat images.

We usually just use PyMOL [1] in our lab, but it looks like BioBlender takes PyMOL, Blender, and a few other structural biology and builds on top of both of them.

It looks like the biggest contribution from BioBlender is that it takes properties such as electrostatic potential and combines it with Blender's physics engine to better simulate movement when creating molecular animations. Most of our work usually involves just examining the 3D structure of a protein, so I don't usually create animations, but this is definitely a really useful tool to do so if any lab might ever need to do something like that.

We really do need more people dedicated to just purely better visualization software in the biological community. A lot of interesting hypotheses often start from just rotating around 3D structures, and making it easier to do so can only help.

[1]: http://pymol.org/

It's a really good way to get a good overview of the field, and what some of the problems have been already solved in bioinformatics. It's definitely best to combine it with a more traditional textbook such as "Introduction to Computational Biology" (Haubold and Wiehe) or "Biological Sequence Analysis" (Mitchison, Krogh, Durbin, and Eddy).

Hope that helps!

[1]: http://rosalind.info/

But here's the rub: if you want to learn "bioinformatics", you're going to have to accept that most of the work is inherently not visual. I worked in about the most shiny, graphical part of biology possible (protein structure), and maybe only 20% of the work involved spinning molecules on a screen.

The real work of bioinformatics involves thinking very hard about problems that are deeply mathematical. The visualization part is strictly secondary -- though it gets the most attention, for obvious reasons.