David Goodsell

David S. Goodsell is an American scientific illustrator and biologist who is an associate professor at the Scripps Research Institute and research professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey (dual appointment). Goodsell is especially well known for his watercolor paintings of cell interiors, and for the creation of an enormous repertoire of educational resources as the founder of RSCB Protein Data Bank's Molecule of the Month.

Career and research Goodsell obtained a Bachelor's of Science in both biology and chemistry from the University of California Irvine in 1982. Since completing his PhD he has worked as a structural biologist at the Scripps Research Institute (with a 2-year period in University of California in 1992–94). His main research focus areas are HIV drug resistance and structure and function of bacterial cells.

Goodsell's illustrations are frequently used as teaching tools, in textbooks, in scientific publications, and as journal cover art. In graduate school, Goodsell became interested in scientific illustration while writing molecular graphics programs to visualize protein and DNA structures. His images of individual proteins are typically computer generated, cell-shaded space-filling representations of proteins, often with cut-aways to show internal binding sites and cofactors.

By contrast, Goodsell's watercolor paintings of cell interiors illustrate various dense molecular landscapes, which feature common cellular processes such as synaptic transmission, cytoskeletal remodeling, and viral uptake. Goodsell's artwork typically depicts a molecular snapshot of the inside of a cell, filled with highly simplified protein structures in a approachable style in order to capture overall organization of intracellular protein complexes without overwhelming detail.

Goodsell's cell interiors are often displayed at an effective 1,000,000x magnification for consistency. The paintings therefore share a consistent style, aiming to make interpretation easy and as intuitive as possible. Many of his illustrations are published in the "Molecule of the Month" series by the Protein Data Bank (PDB), an archive of protein structures.

Illustration

Process For individual proteins, Goodsell's illustrations are directly generated from solved protein structures deposited in the PDB using custom computer renderings that he wrote in Fortran (now released as an online illustration tool). Representations of large macromolecular complexes or crowded cellular environments require interpretation and synthesis of multiple different types of scientific imaging. These include X-ray crystallography and NMR for protein components, cryo electron tomography for larger complexes, and super-res light microscopy and electron microscopy for the cellular environment. In these cases, the focus is on portraying the relative scales, orientations and interactions between the components. The award honors an outstanding protein scientist who has also made exceptional contributions in the areas of education and/or service.