Speaker: Dr. Tanja Gesell (Department of Structural and Computational Biology, University of Vienna)
Structural concepts are important on many levels for molecular biology. In this talk, I will additionally underline the importance of visualization methods for structural research, while also juxtaposing the formation visualization concept as an engineering field with artistic representations as a field of fine arts.
As a first example, I will define a phylogenetic structure based on a simulation framework for (molecular) sequence evolution. On the one side, I will discuss scientific applications: for example for selecting and filtering non-coding RNA gene-candidates. From the perspective of information visualization, tools that allows for the interactive exploration of candidates and their genomic regions have been validated and evaluated. On the other side, I will discuss some of the points and questions, which arise about the incompleteness of any structure’s description and visualization.
As a second example , I will present our most recently development of a chemical descriptor system for small molecules, the Shannon entropy descriptor.