If you’ve spent any time in our reading room on the 1st level of the Medical Center Library, you might have noticed the striking and colorful ribbon illustrations on the walls in between the bookshelves! But you might not know the importance of these images to the history of protein science and scientific visualization! They are the influential work of Duke scientists Jane and Dave Richardson.
The ribbon diagrams or “Richardson diagrams” are now ubiquitous in depiction of proteins today, but they were first hand-drawn by Jane Richardson. She is widely recognized for the creation of this new visual language, first published in “Advances in Protein Chemistry” in 1981. The drawings stemmed from the realization that a general classification scheme could be developed from the recurring patterns of structural motifs within the “folds” of proteins. She created ribbon drawings of those folds, making a uniform set of conventions for drawing the seventy-five protein structures that had been solved at that time. Throughout their careers, Jane and Dave Richardson have continued to pioneer new ways of visualizing proteins and sharing their passion and expertise with the scientific community.
For display on the walls of the reading room, we selected four visually striking images created by the Richardsons. See below for brief descriptions of each image below:
Cu,Zn SuperOxide Dismutase (SOD) ribbon drawing
This colored pencil drawing of second protein structure solved by the Richardsons. Others in the Duke Biochemistry Department had determined its sequence and metal content and discovered its crucial antioxidant protective function, which opened up a whole new field of oxygen-radical biology.
Full, interactive ribbons in “kinemage” format with Dave’s Mage program
These Mage computer-drawn ribbons show the relationship of the two Cu,Zn SOD dimers in a repeating unit of the crystal.
Triose phosphate isomerase (TIM) ribbon drawing
This drawing is an example of an especially elegant and very widespread protein "fold". It is Jane's favorite ribbon drawing, and was the Wikipedia picture-of-the-day on November 19, 2009.
Triose phosphate isomerase (TIM) ribbon drawing, down barrel axis
The TIM barrel fold is even more easily recognized from a "top" view down into the active site.
To learn more about the Richardsons and their work, we invite you to check out the online exhibit for Seeing the Invisible: 50 Years of Macromolecular Visualization which was on physical display in the Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family Gallery from February 7, 2020 – July 21, 2020.
The take-home messages that Jane and Dave wanted communicated in this exhibit are particularly inspiring:
- Protein and RNA structures are inherently elegant.
- Collaboration is better than competition.
- The model is not the molecule.
- Science is fun, especially the details.
- We believe in working on what looks most intriguing and productive, enjoy methods development, and prefer projects that other people don't yet see as both important and possible, so that they might not be done if we didn't do them. Therefore we've reinvented our research emphasis many times: from protein crystallography to structural bioinformatics, to protein design, to molecular representation and computer graphics, to lowest-level details of atomic packing, to RNA backbone and ribosomes, to model validation and improvement, to crystallography again. However, within that rather random-looking trajectory we think there is a consistent signal of unifying themes: fascination with the determinants of macromolecular three-dimensional structure, and seeking new understanding largely by redefining the boundary between signal and noise, in either direction.
We are so glad that we are able to highlight their work in our library space as well as preserve their professional papers in the Duke Medical Center Archives. To learn more about this collection, visit the finding aid or contact the archives staff. Finally, we encourage you to listen to an oral history interview with Jane here.