File: Nature_-_04_06_2020.pdf
Annotation summary:
— Page 405 —
Highlight (color #D3D2EE): 2019, a graduate student working in Sattler’s laboratory suggested an alternative. BioRender, a web-based tool designed for life-science and medical illustration, is like a feature-lite version of Illustrator. Developed in Toronto, Canada, by a start-up of the same name, and launched in 2017, it features an extensive library of scalable ‘icons’ from across the life sciences and medicine; researchers can
drop these onto a canvas and manipulate them as if they were circles or polygons. For Sattler, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, that made it possible to quickly illustrate cell-differentiation pathways without having to draw each cell from scratch. “Everybody was like, oh my God, this is awesome,” Sattler says. “We jumped on this very, very quickly, and we’ve been using really nothing else since then.”
Show, not tell Scientific success requires an effective level of communication, whether with peer review-ers, funding agencies or colleagues. In a field in which the communication channels that count — journal articles and grant applications — often have page limits, an illustration can be worth far more than a thousand words. “If you want to communicate your findings, or in the case of a grant application if you just want to explain what you want to do, it’s really important to use graphics,” says Wilfried Rossoll, a cell biologist at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. Unlike data figures that detail primary
GRAPHIC CONTENT: PICTURING SCIENCE The web-based tool BioRender has become a staple of biomedical research drawings. By Jeffrey M. Perkel
research findings, these graphics are typically illustrated explainers of proposed mod-els, experimental methods or biochemical pathways. More and more journals allow researchers to include graphical abstracts, for instance — illustrations intended to summarize the key conclusions of a paper. Researchers typically create those illus-trations using PowerPoint or Illustrator, or analogues thereof. But none of these was designed specifically for scientists, so they can be challenging to use. “I would have banged my head against the wall” trying to use Illustra-tor had it not been for BioRender, says Signe Elisabeth Åsberg, a sepsis researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technol-ogy in Trondheim, as she recalls the graphics she made for her thesis. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, echoes that sentiment. Using Illustrator, she says, “it would take me days to create figures of tissues or cell types or vasculature. But with BioRender, within minutes I can draw what I need.”
Fully equipped That’s thanks mostly to BioRender’s library of around 30,000 life-science icons, which includes anatomical drawings and depictions of everything from SARS-CoV-2 virus parti-cles to fruit flies. Users can resize, rotate and change the colour of those icons. But they can-not change their fundamental appearance, for instance to add or remove a protein domain. The library also includes icons for specific pieces of laboratory kit, making it possible to illustrate protocols with images of the actual equipment used. Among the items depicted are the Orbitrap Fusion Tribrid mass spectrom-eter, made by Thermo Fisher Scientific in Waltham, Massachusetts, and the MinION DNA sequencer, from Oxford Nanopore Technologies in the United Kingdom. Beth Kenkel, an associate scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb in Seattle, says that this feature helps in her presentations to her team. “I can quickly make a graphic representation of how I plan to do an experiment. And then I can solicit feed-back from my co-workers: is this how I should design it, or should I change something?” Researchers can also create icons that represent specific structures in the Protein Data Bank, an open-access digital archive providing access to 3D structure data for proteins and nucleic acids. In March the com-pany rolled out an enhanced Protein Data Bank interface that enables BioRender to produce “more painterly” renderings than its earlier iteration, says Shiz Aoki, a medical illustrator who co-founded BioRender. Users can also request custom icons from the BioRender team. Rossoll, for example, has ordered icons that represent two pieces of equipment used in tissue processing for immunohistochemical
(report generated by GoodReader)