File: Nature_-_04_06_2020.pdf
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\nHighlight (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 \u2018icons’ from across the life sciences and medicine; researchers can
\ndrop 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. \u201cEverybody was like, oh my God, this is awesome,\u201d Sattler says. \u201cWe jumped on this very, very quickly, and we’ve been using really nothing else since then.\u201d
\nShow, 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 \u2014 journal articles and grant applications \u2014 often have page limits, an illustration can be worth far more than a thousand words. \u201cIf 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,\u201d says Wilfried Rossoll, a cell biologist at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. Unlike data figures that detail primary
\nGRAPHIC CONTENT: PICTURING SCIENCE The web-based tool BioRender has become a staple of biomedical research drawings. By Jeffrey M. Perkel
\nresearch 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 \u2014 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. \u201cI would have banged my head against the wall\u201d trying to use Illustra-tor had it not been for BioRender, says Signe Elisabeth \u00c5sberg, 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, \u201cit 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.\u201d
\nFully 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. \u201cI 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?\u201d 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 \u201cmore painterly\u201d 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
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