Image of the Month: The Art of Proteins

Irina Bezsonova’s collection of ink drawings celebrates fifty years of the Protein Data Bank

Lauren Robertson | 04/01/2022 | Gallery

Each year, thousands of people take part in Inktober – a worldwide drawing challenge that encourages artists to hone their skills and create one work of art every day during the month of October. Last year, in celebration of 50 years of the Protein Data Bank archive, Irina Bezsonova decided to use the (more than) 180,000-strong database as a source for her prompts.

With some help from the Twitter community, Bezsonova – a structural biologist from the University of Connecticut – selected one protein each day that aligned with the official Inktober prompt – words like “crystal,” “knot,” and “sour.” A personal favorite (seen below) is the “loop” prompt, which gave rise to the NMR spectroscopy structure of the outer membrane enzyme PagP being represented with some knitting needles.

Overall, there are 31 drawings now available to download for free, each with the corresponding prompt, PDB structure, and a little information about the idea behind the sketch in question.

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Lauren Robertson

By the time I finished my degree in Microbiology I had come to one conclusion – I did not want to work in a lab. Instead, I decided to move to the south of Spain to teach English. After two brilliant years, I realized that I missed science, and what I really enjoyed was communicating scientific ideas – whether that be to four-year-olds or mature professionals. On returning to England I landed a role in science writing and found it combined my passions perfectly. Now at Texere, I get to hone these skills every day by writing about the latest research in an exciting, creative way.