Art in Crystallography

This watercolor illustration, entitled Blood 2,000,000X, shows a cross-section through the blood, magnified by about two million times. It received first place in a new competition, called Art in Crystallography, sponsored by the American Crystallographic Association (ACA) Newsletter and the ACA Council. It was created by David Goodsell, an artist and crystallographer at the Scripps Research Institute in California.

Blood serum, the clear fluid part of the blood, is shown in the upper half and a red blood cell in the lower half. In the serum, look for Y-shaped antibodies, long thin molecules of fibrinogen (a protein that helps perform coagulation, in light red) and many small albumin proteins (the most common types of proteins in the blood). The large UFO-shaped objects are low density lipoprotein (the "bad" type of cholesterol) and the six-armed protein is complement C1, a protein involved in defense against bacterial infection. The red blood cell is filled with hemoglobin, in red.The cell wall, in purple, is braced on the inner surface by a network of structural proteins, with long chains of spectrin connected together by small segments of actin. (Source: ACA's Art in Crystallography website.)

Winner of the second prize in the Art in Crystallography competition, this sculpture is entitled "Cortisol," named after the hormone that is released in response to physical stress. The sculpture, by artist and crystallographer Edgar Meyer, was carved from laminated 3" blocks of walnut and finished with several coats of marine-grade polyurethane spar varnish. The model was made from the structure that forms when cortisol attaches to receptors in the protein 1gs4. According to Meyer, the wood was so beautiful that the "box" around the sculpture was kept. (Source: ACA's Art in Crystallography website.)

Numerous other examples of art in crystallography can be found at the Art in Crystallography page.

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