Chemists like to see and touch models of the molecules we work with. In lecture and laboratory courses we encourage students to build models which help show the spatial orientation, geometry and other subtle nuances of the structure that a flat image hides. For most chemists, models are easy to build with commercial kits as they are interested in molecules with less than 30 atoms. However, for biochemists, our molecules typically contain hundreds or thousands of atoms. For this reason, models can be expensive and tedious to build using a standard chemistry model kit. With better computers and graphics systems, biochemists have headed towards using digital models with textbooks using images derived from these models.
However, for students there is often a disconnect between the pictures in the textbook and the elegant surfaces and shapes that are key to life.
In the Spring of 2015, my Biochemistry II students visited the 3SPACE lab to print out models of proteins or other biomolecules. Our goal was to see and touch models of biomolecule surfaces to understand biological function, while also thinking about how 3-D printing could play a role in their future careers as physicians, forensic scientists, and lab scientists. Students selected proteins of interest from the Protein Data Bank (www.rcsb.org) which we then coverted to .STL files using Chimera (http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/).
These files were then ready to print without further modification. We printed structures of viral particles, ubiquitin, GroEL/GroES, and others as both surface representations but also some in cartoon representations which the students know well from their textbook. Along the way we also learned lessons about printing multiple models from the same printer (okay to do, but slow down the print speed) or how difficult cartoon representations are to print (need WIDE ribbons in your model). In the 3 hour visit, we printed nearly 20 models, which the students held and traded around like toys.
Looking forward, I realize how valuable these models can be to students and how I should be using them in all of my Biochemistry courses. For all the fantastic and high-quality representations I show students on the page and on a computer screen, being able to plug ATP into the active site of a kinase manually still captures their attention the most.
The accessibility of the models to students and the ability to compare the figure on a page to a representation on the screen to a hand-held model is an incredible experience which provides tremendous insight into protein structure.
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