About our hack

Using the browser-based 3D Large-Model Viewer API provided by Autodesk we aim to be able to provide beautiful, modular and user annotated 3D models of proteins and other molecular structures. Today most online protein 3D viewers are rather crude and so this application could possesses a huge promise for the provision of high quality scientific communication and educational tools, as well as potentially assisting in research directly. There is a wealth of structural and atomic location data for molecular molecular to be found on the well-established and still rapidly expanding Protein data base (PDB). We are therefore building a pipeline to convert the PDB formatted code into an .fbx file in order for it to be read by the Autodesk software. The pipeline is set up as follows: Potential room for development: working with customised extensions for any given structure.

App Walkthrough

The app is organised in four general steps, the latter of which are open to further development:


  1. 1. Conversion and translation
    Automating successive file conversion from archival PDB code to VRML format and then through .wrl file format (via UCSF Chimera) into the LMV compatible .fbx file format (via Blender).


  2. 2. Hosting models in LMV via the View and Data API
    Hosting the converted format model files in the LMV API via their bucket storage.

  3. 3. Webpage hosting for dynamic model display
    Checking against a list of already processed PDB codes, or generation of new 3D models and uploading to Autodesk.com.


  4. 4. Extensible models: annotation and exploration

  5. Potential room for development: working with customised extensions for any given structure.