Yasemin Saplakoglu writes:

Jane Richardson never considered herself an artist. Then, in the late 1970s, the structural biologist found herself in need of some colored pencils, pastels and sketching paper.

Richardson, a professor of biochemistry at Duke University, studied proteins, the biomolecules that underpin all the workings of life. At the time, structural biologists were getting better at creating 3D models of proteins’ minuscule atomic structures; she and her husband Dave, with whom she shared a lab, had determined two of the field’s first 20 known protein structures. But the scientists struggled to convey the information to one another. The field had no standardized way to compare protein shapes. In scientific papers, the complex molecules were portrayed without uniformity, as if each researcher had invented their own way of illustrating them.

So Richardson took up the challenge of designing a new kind of scientific illustration — just for proteins. She studied how to represent three-dimensional shapes in two dimensions, including the artwork of M.C. Escher. She spoke with artists. She thought back to a class she had taken on illusions. She examined a belt as she twisted it left and right.

Then she picked up her pencils and began sketching. “I’m not an artist; I can’t draw anything else,” she said in a recent interview with Quanta. It was “a lot of draw and erase, draw and erase, draw and erase.” After a year of trial and error, she homed in on elegant sheets and looping ribbons to represent atomic structures. These drawings, which first appeared in the journal Advances in Protein Chemistry in 1981, became known as ribbon diagrams.

Richardson’s drawing style was quickly adopted. Structural biologists appreciated how well the diagrams conveyed the folds of a protein’s molecular backbone and how they allowed researchers to compare different proteins using the same visual language. [Continue reading…]