Printing proteins: pdb to scad

Getting a message from Cathal Garvey reminded me I haven't played with OpenSCAD for a while. OpenSCAD is a simple but powerful scripting language for making 3D models. I've been wondering for a while about converting PDB files into spacefill models of molecules in a format I could print them from, so I wrote a little Perl script to convert PDB to SCAD. Nothing clever. 

This might look like a bear investigating a big flower, but it's actually aspirin rendered in OpenSCAD from this PDB file.

 

My new toy

The nice people I soon will have once worked with bought me some really cool leaving presents, including a USB microscope! Hurrah.

Packing foam

Manchester the Hippopotamus

After first going to Manchester some time last century(!), it's finally time to leave. I'll be off to Sheffield soon to work with Cap'n Bilko on a new biofuels project. It isn't a totally new angle for me - much of the groundwork has been laid in Manchester through my work on modelling lipid metabolism. I'm hoping to do something applied and results-driven, not pie-in-the-sky/25 years until it works stuff. Not that there is anything wrong with basic research, just that we can't and needn't wait any longer for this project.

My time at Manchester was split between tiny, friendly UMIST, and big, cumbersome Manchester. This was quite some cultural change given that my desk never moved more than 150 yards when they merged in 2004.

Jackson's Mill on the old UMIST campus, where I did my PhD View Larger Map