Many researchers use software such as RasMol to visualize three-dimensional structures of proteins. But what if a researcher is blind? What’s the best way to navigate those same proteins?
Timothy Cordes, a blind medical scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, faces this challenge every day in his X-ray crystallography research. In the past, he had to go through several steps to figure out the spatial relationships of atoms and amino acid residues in a protein. “For everything I wanted to look at, I’d have to go into one program and write a file and then read it in another,” he says. “I realized I needed a tool to help me streamline the process.”