nucleus with cytoskeleton
agency: Digizyme — concept & art direction
client: Assay Designs
use: poster background, 22 x 18 in
This image was originally used as the background to a poster on heat shock proteins developed for ADI. In the full poster (below right) the background is used to suggest four "spaces" where hsps are active — post-translational folding (near the nucleus), receptor folding (near the membrane), mitochondrial protien folding, and cytoskeletal maintenance.
The full poster is really cool, and should be available online from ADI here, but it's too busy for use as a background on this site. Despite the reduced complexity, there are some points of interest:
For the biologists, the nuclear pores are roughly modeled on cryo-EM data; the actin filaments are based on the fiber description in hol_41_374, and the tubulin and tiny kinesin models are based on PDB data as well.
For 3D-geeks, the strucures were modeled in Cinema4D and modo. The long fibers are modeled as simple cylinders with tiling displacement maps; this allows the creation of arbitrarily long fibers — as long as you don't run out of memory.