Developing novel methods to image and visualize 3D genomes.

To investigate three-dimensional (3D) genome organization in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, three main strategies are employed, namely nuclear proximity ligation-based methods, imaging tools (such as fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and its derivatives), and computational/visualization methods. Proximity ligation-based methods are based on digestion and re-ligation of physically proximal cross-linked chromatin fragments accompanied by massively parallel DNA sequencing to measure the relative spatial proximity between genomic loci. Imaging tools enable direct visualization and quantification of spatial distances between genomic loci, and advanced implementation of (super-resolution) microscopy helps to significantly improve the resolution of images.

Web3DMol: interactive protein structure visualization based on WebGL.

A growing number of web-based databases and tools for protein research are being developed. There is now a widespread need for visualization tools to present the three-dimensional (3D) structure of proteins in web browsers. Here, we introduce our 3D modeling program-Web3DMol-a web application focusing on protein structure visualization in modern web browsers.