[Product Design and Development]

… Their winning video, “Rapid Visual Inventory & Comparison of Complex 3D Structures,” illustrates the tool that enables scientists to compare and contrast multiple parameters of complicated structures, like those found in whole-cell tomograms, at a glance. The video shows how the tool can morph beta cells into simplified geometric versions to enable the visual comparison of the organelle volumes of a single cell and how it can compare relationships between four beta cells collected by Noske, Marsh, and colleagues under different physiological conditions.

“Scientists and general audiences alike can learn a great deal about biology by comparing the internal structural differences between cells harvested from different environments, say from different parts of your body or different lifecycle stages,” said Johnson, an alumnus of the Scripps Research Institute’s Kellogg School of Science and Technology and a newly appointed QB3@University of California San Francisco Faculty Fellow. “Morphing the cell from the complicated native model to the simplified version and back gets general audiences excited about the subject matter and reminds even expert audiences of the complex interplay of randomness and specific interaction that enables life to exist.”

Read the full story here: http://www.pddnet.com/news-scripps-alumnus-wins-international-science-engineering-visualization-challenge-020312/