Interactive Sonification for Structural Biology and Structure-based Drug Design

The visualisation of structural biology data can be quite challenging as the datasets are complex, in particular the intrinsic dynamics/flexibility. Therefore some researchers have looked into the use of sonification for the display of proteins. Combining sonification and visualisation appears to be well fitted to this problem, but at the time of writing there are no plugins available for any of the major molecular visualisation applications. Therefore we set out to develop a sonification plugin for one of those applications, released as open-source software, in order to facilitate scrutiny and evaluation from as many parties as possible. This paper presents our open source sonification plugin for UCSF Chimera, which we have developed in collaboration with medicinal chemists and structural biologists. We determined two tasks that we deemed were not well represented visually and developed sonifications for them. Furthermore, we extended a general-purpose Chimera tool to map attributes of protein residues to pitch. We evaluated one of the tasks with eight participants and present the results of this evaluation.