In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the use of animation as a means to communicate complex biological processes to a wide range of audiences. My group and others have seen that 3D animation software can be used to synthesize spatial and dynamic information from a variety of experimental modalities, and that this process can provide important scientific insights and provide a contextualized view of how molecular and cellular systems operate. These visualizations have served not only to make molecular concepts more accessible to students and the public but have also proven to be extremely useful for researchers seeking to build and refine their hypotheses. Researchers currently lack dedicated software tools to readily create dynamic visual models of the molecular processes they study due to the steep learning curve for most 3D graphics applications. We have developed a plugin for the open source animation software Blender that offers a streamlined and intuitive set of tools to allow users to start creating molecular visualizations after viewing a short tutorial. We are also developing new methods to enable molecular biologists to share and annotate their visualizations.
Lee et al. (Sun,) studied this question.