Abstract
The study of biological processes carried out in living organisms is among the central foci of modern science. The field is nowadays by large extent computational, there are many kinds of digital models that characterize particular aspects of life. To provide a comprehensive view on biological phenomena, visualization offers itself for integrating multiple models into one visual environment.
One of the interesting challenges, associated with such a visual integration, is to communicate phenomena that are simultaneously described on several spatial and temporal scales. In my talk we will discuss a variety of visualization techniques that bridge several orders of magnitude of spatial scale by interactively rendering structural information from a single atom level (10?10 m) up to the scale of entire viruses or bacteria with a complete molecular machinery (ca. 10?6 m). Integrative structural biology models are very dense and consist of many structures each of these serving a particular function. In order to convey such information clearly, I will discuss how visual abstractions help us to visualize multiple scales and how these techniques can be used to deal with the structural occlusion inherent in the integrative model. To convey a living structure, large structural models can be extended with dynamic biological models of physiology. In the last part of my talk I will discuss an integration of molecular reaction pathways with the structure. The reactions are modelled quantitatively, can be executed in run-time during interactive visualization to allow for interactive visual steering of the simulation parameters.