BAIFANG LU
College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore
ZHAOWEI FAN
College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore
JIANMIN ZHENG
College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore
LIN LI
College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore

Received 9 March 2004
Revised 27 June 2005
Accepted 19 October 2005

Bio structural and functional research and education is playing an increasingly important role in today's post-genome era. Protein geometry and shape modeling is thus a fundamental issue for protein visualization. The number of protein structures determined by X-ray crystallography or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is expanding in an exponential rate. Recent technology advancement has also made it possible for the determination of larger and more complicated proteins structure. A generic and automatic shape modeling for protein structures is therefore highly desired for effective and efficient protein visualization. We propose a bio-native geometric modeling technique in this paper for constructing protein secondary structure. Our emphasis is placed on the shape compatibility with the protein conformation property. Efforts are also made to handle smooth sweeping for complex protein structures. We describe as well a Virtual Reality (VR) application for protein structure education based on our Bio-native shape modeling and visualization techniques developed in this work.

Structure biology; protein structure; shape modeling; visualization; VR