Do people still request biomedical illustration service?

Much less than before. AI is getting more advanced, while users are getting more skillful at writing prompts. In most cases AI will be able to generate the output you are happy with. There are many AI generated images decorating scientific journals.. From an artistic and engineering perspective, it is much more difficult to create a photorealistic face than to train AI in representing various molecular interactions. To our knowledge, people are not training AIs to do the latter, but it will eventually be done. We don’t hate AI. It is just a tool and eventually people will start seeing it that way.

Who Benefits From This Service?

Our service is geared toward the clients who are more concerned about details and specific presentation of their idea from some mechanistic or structural perspective. For example, the illustration on the right shows the interaction of the spike protein trimer with a fragment of Ace2 receptor. The receptor is much bigger than the spike protein, but this is what Zhang et al. were able to crystallize (pdb_00007dx5). We show the individual spike protein monomers in different colors and textures and specifically emphasizes the residues involved in binding by representing them in gold color and ribbon structure. Feel free to download the file and make a similar representation to get a better idea of the nature of this service.

To help your idea stand out visually, we provide a variety of illustration styles. The widely-used molecular visualization programs such PyMol offer impressive automatic outputs. The only possible drawback is that there are so many great looking, yet similar figures. It almost seems that someone has already standardized the overall appearance of illustrations in biomedical publications. Changing it would seem bad to somewhat less courageous scientists. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. More illustrations are in the gallery section.