Exploring Molecular Nodes

Introduction

I've always been fascinated by the idea of extending human lifespan. While the concept of uploading consciousness to a machine doesn't appeal to me, I'm drawn to the biological approach of reversing the aging process. After reading "Lifespan" by David Sinclair and "Ageless" by Andrew Steele, I was encouraged by the growing number of researchers working in this field, though the timeline remains scarily far away. Imagine being the generation who starts to die off just as they invent the cure for ageing!

Wanting to contribute somehow, but not yet having a background in biology, I decided to approach this interest through a familiar medium. At the 2022 Blender Conference, I attended a presentation by Brady Johnston about Molecular Nodes - a tool that bridges biological data with Blender's 3D environment. Given my existing knowledge of Blender, I thought exploring Molecular Nodes could be an engaging way to learn computational biology concepts while working with things I already knew about.

Objectives

The things I'd like to do as part of this project are:

• Create some cool protein visualisations with Blender's Molecular Nodes and Three.js
• Build Molecular Nodes locally and contribute something to the project
• Develop my understanding of how molecular biology works

Implementation

Creating a viewer

The first thing I wanted to do was to launch molecular nodes, export a glb and get it displayed on this page. The first step would be to create a 3D model viewer that I could reuse all over this site - you can see this below displaying the classic Blender monkey Suzanne

Wow, look at that! A viewer created using threejs displaying the Blender monkey Suzanne. That was implemented mostly by asking the Cursor agent to create a model viewer component for me. The first shot was pretty good, just needed some slight lighting tweaking and adding the ability to add a caption. Easy!

Things I Learned

This section will cover the key learnings and insights gained from working on this project.

Next Time

This section will discuss future improvements and next steps for the project.