Colorful, twisty ribbon diagrams and the deep connections they represent

By Federica Ruggieri, lead researcher on enginzyme's biocatalysis team

This week I read a wonderful article in Quanta Magazine about how Jane Richardson, a structural biologist, came up with the colorful ribbon diagrams that we all now automatically associate with proteins.

“Today, ribbon diagrams are the ubiquitous face of proteins in scientific articles, textbooks and magazines, known for their particular combination of clarity and beauty,” the author, Yasemin Saplakoglu, writes.

Indeed, they are — but despite the fact that these drawings and their modern, computer-generated grandchildren have been a big part of my life since I started university, I never investigated the story behind them. Somehow, I took for granted that they were the product of a big brainstorming session that happened long ago.

I admit that, sadly, I had never heard of Jane Richardson. She single-handedly found the perfect visual language to elegantly represent the deep connections among physics, chemistry, and biology that took me so long to recognize. How many people can say they have done something as impressive as this?

Thanks to her ribbon drawings, I ultimately came to understand that the boundary between biology, chemistry, and physics doesn’t really exist. It is a construct, a simplification. Those “spaghetti knots” that my younger self struggled to read embodied the deep connections among these three disciplines.

I was especially pleased to find out that well before I was born, a woman had developed the diagrams that we use every single day. In the world of chemistry there are still too few examples like this. My hope is that my children will stumble on many more such stories.

In her article, Saplakoglu captures the importance of what Richardson accomplished. But she also captured something that is often overlooked: to be a scientist, you need to have a little bit of an artist in you — an inner aesthete that enjoys observing nature's wondrous machines and appreciates the patterns and the “big pictures” they create.

At enginzyme, we have these incredible databases and tools that allow us to represent proteins in many different ways — to slice them, to zoom in on them and to dive deep into the heart of their structures. With modern science, protein structures can be built at an unprecedented pace — but their secrets are still well kept. How do proteins do what they do? How can we make them better? What else could we make them do? That’s work for artists.

I would not say we are artists in the common use of the word — and we’re probably not doing something as fundamental as inventing a visual language. But we are trying to do things that nobody has done before. We’re using imagination to mold solutions out of proteins — and we need to make these beautiful proteins feel comfortable with what we want them to do.

I was only vaguely aware of Quanta before a friend sent me this article, but now I’m really interested in the magazine and I want to read more from Saplakoglu because she seems to be a protein person, just like me.