Illinois professor turns molecules into artwork

URBANA, Ill. -- Emad Tajkhorshid's wife probably wouldn't let him pick the paint for the living room; he admits he's bad with colors.\nBut that didn't stop organizers of an art exhibit in New York from inquiring about visual handiwork by Tajkhorshid and his colleagues at the University of Illinois' Beckman Institute.\nIf you think water molecules passing through channels created by proteins in cell membranes would look strange on a gallery wall, then you haven't seen the images from the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at Beckman, where Tajkhorshid is deputy \ndirector.\nYou might call him the art director as well, but it is art with a scientific purpose. The images, animations and even sculpture created by the group are all about understanding the complex interactions among atoms that govern the molecular mechanisms at the root of all biology, including ours.\n"It's not enough to have a pretty picture," Tajkhorshid said. "You really have to have a clear message incorporated in that picture."\nThe images illustrating the group's latest attention-grabbing study are a case in point. The study by doctoral student Yi Wang; U of I Professor Klaus Schulten, who heads the research group; and Tajkhorshid showed how cells regulate the movement of water and sugar molecules through their walls.\nThe process depends not on some complicated series of atomic-scale gates or checkpoints, they found, but whether the protein channels are an angstrom -- there are 254 million angstroms in an inch -- narrower or wider.\nThink of an alley wide enough for a sports car (a water molecule) to pass versus one big enough for a family sedan (a slightly larger glycerol molecule), but not so broad that it would let a truck through.\nThe images created by the U of I researchers show cutaways of the water and sugar channels, intricately rendered and colored to make the difference between them clear.\nIt is an example, as Schulten likes to say, of one of the most basic biological processes going on inside us all the time and essential to our well-being. Malfunctions in the process have been tied to a variety of diseases, and protein channels in general are a target of a large number of drug therapies.\nLast year, a Tajkhorshid illustration showing water molecules moving through cell membrane channels formed by proteins called aquaporins was chosen as the top scientific visualization of the year by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science.\nParticularly impressive was the way the colorful image -- they even brought in an artist to help tweak the colors -- created an illusion of motion.\n"We really try to show a dynamic event," Tajkhorshid said.\nThe Beckman group also has animated the process and used a 3-D "printer," which turns computer renderings into real-world pieces by building up layers of plastic to sculpt physical renditions of channel-forming proteins. Among other things, its work was cited in conjunction with the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry, which focused on membrane channels.\nTajkhorshid is now considered a leading expert in the field, but he didn't start out to be an artist.\nOriginally from Iran, he trained as a pharmacist. He received his doctorate in medicinal chemistry and then did another in biophysics at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.\nIn Germany, he began using computational models for drug design and to examine proteins and membrane channels. That led him to Schulten at the U of I, who had been looking for years at a type of channel Tajkhorshid was studying.