Melih Sener, Stuart Levy, John E. Stone, AJ Christensen, Barry Isralewitz,
Robert Patterson, Kalina Borkiewicz, Jeffrey Carpenter, C. Neil Hunter, Zaida
Luthey-Schulten, and Donna Cox.
Multiscale modeling and cinematic visualization of photosynthetic
energy conversion processes from electronic to cell scales.
Parallel Computing, 102:102698, 2021.
SENE2021
Conversion of sunlight into chemical energy, namely photosynthesis, is the
primary energy source of life on Earth. A visualization depicting this
process, based on multiscale computational models from electronic to cell
scales, is presented in the form of an excerpt from the fulldome show Birth of
Planet Earth. This accessible visual narrative shows a lay audience, including
children, how the energy of sunlight is captured, converted, and stored
through a chain of proteins to power living cells. The visualization is the
result of a multi-year collaboration among biophysicists, visualization
scientists, and artists, which, in turn, is based on a decade-long
experimental-computational collaboration on structural and functional modeling
that produced an atomic detail description of a bacterial bioenergetic
organelle, the chromatophore. Software advancements necessitated by this
project have led to significant performance and feature advances, including
hardware-accelerated cinematic ray tracing and instanced visualizations for
efficient cell-scale modeling. The energy conversion steps depicted feature an
integration of function from electronic to cell levels, spanning nearly 12
orders of magnitude in time scales. This atomic detail description uniquely
enables a modern retelling of one of humanity’s earliest stories—the interplay
between light and life.
