Artistic Science at ISMB #ISMB2016 #Art #Science
Scientists are not only creative and innovative in order to find answers to the universe’s questions, but can be creative in the way they present them as well! Examples of this creativity were shown during the poster session on the first day of ISMB when a few participants took the initiative of presenting their posters in a ‘unique’ way. While the research of one poster was presented as a ‘comic-book’ style dialogue conversation between two people, another participant decided to take an alternative route of painting the poster instead of getting it printed ;). Manjusha Chintalapati et al, from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary anthropology took the initiative to present her research work in form of an art piece. She painted the entire poster which was titled “Using Neandertal genome to study the evolution of small insertions and deletions in modern humans”.
Neandertals can be described as ‘ancestors’ of present humans (Homo sapiens). They are basically subspecies of humans who became extinct between 40,000 and 28,000 years ago. Hence, the poster highlights utilising genome sequence of current human species (homo sapiens) and Neandertals to find the variations particularly the short indels and further classify them into to three categories: (i) indels that existed or occured earlier than the split (of Homo sapiens) from Neandertals in evolutionary tree(named Neandertal-shared indels), (ii) indels that likely arose after the split(of Homo sapiens) from Neandertals (named as modern-human specific indels), and (iii) indels that most likely contributing to the modern human populations outside of Africa through admixture with Neandertals named as (introgressed indels). Based on the analysis, they were able to find a comprehensive list of introgressed and modern human specific indels that are predicted to affect phenotype(physical characteristics or composition) in modern humans. Further, they could trace the specific evolutionary path of modern humans which was displayed in the form of a tree as depicted in right side of the poster.
Artistic influence wasn’t limited to few posters. It was also present in the interesting submissions in Arts and Science section, where the unknown and known nature of human proteome was depicted beautifully as a photograph of a toddler in dark titled “Dark Proteome” by O’ Donoghue et al from CSIRO and Garvan Institute, Australia.
The photograph imparts a message how only 12 percent of the information regarding proteins are known via experimental studies depicted by the light imprints on the face. In addition,36 percent structural information is inferred via homology modelling and rest remaining is in ‘dark’ or unknown and hence depicted.
Amina Qutub et al from Rice and NCQ, USA displayed primary human endothelial cells obtained during course of research in a piece of art. They used immunocytochemistry technique to outline the cytoskeletal proteins of the cells with red color for microtubulues and green color for actin, whereas blue color for nuclei. Another image drawn by this group depicted tiles of human brain cancer (glioblastoma) at 10x and 20x resolution.
The displays were interesting to look at, as well as showcasing unconventional ways of representation of scientific research.
Disclaimer: Any views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily those of PLOS.
