Nanome v2

Impressive!

Worth a look for any molecular structure enthusiast

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Handling the Building Blocks of Life

This VR app is incredible for anyone interested in the structure and analysis of molecules – from the simplest molecules to massively complex biochemicals such as DNA and proteins containing thousands of amino acids. The app is mainly focused towards professional biochemists and medicinal chemists working for pharmaceutical companies in developing drugs and providing them with a virtual collaboration environment, but students, teachers, and anyone who wants to see the 2D representation of molecules in their textbook come “alive” will be amazed. As a retired NASA engineer, I was more focused on the universe “outside”, but this app allows you to see and handle the molecular structures of the fundamental units of life that exist in the “inner” universe of your cells. You can enlarge the “recipe book of life”, the spiral ladder of the DNA molecule, to the size of your room and literally walk inside it and move and rotate it in your hands to see the A,T,C,G nucleotides and how they are bonded together to form the rungs and how the sugar-phosphate molecules bond to the nucleotides to form the “rails”. You can do the same with, for example, an insulin protein molecule to see how different amino acids are chained together to form the protein. The app supports the downloading of hundreds of thousands of different proteins, nucleic acids, and other organic and inorganic molecules from the publicly available PDB (Protein Data Bank) and PubChem (the world’s largest open-access database for chemicals managed by NIH). There is also a molecule builder in the app that you can use to build molecules from scratch. To get started, you can import “simple” molecules like insulin (51 amino acids) from the PDB and learn how to manipulate and modify structures. There’s also Youtube video tutorials at the Nanome website that cover its major features. You don’t have to be a drug chemist looking to develop a vaccine for the next COVID virus or a researcher at the NIH trying to find the cure for cancer to learn and enjoy this app. Of course, if you are interested in pursuing a career in those areas, then I can’t recommend this app enough. It should take some of the “fear” out of organic chemistry! Or you could just be a casual user like me who simply wants to use the magic of VR to learn about the wonders within us and do something more worthwhile than shooting zombies!