Dear Dave, Here come my five pence... I personally found stereo graphics useful in two cases.
1. When you first introduce students to biomolecular structure and/or biocrystallography. Showing stereo certainly helps 'building up' the initial fascination, which is very important of course. But since we do not have a classroom stereo setup, I am just speaking of seating a new/prospective (graduate) student in front of a stereo workstation. 2. When one performs more difficult tasks while doing research (although it was not your question). This includes building difficult regions in poor/low resolution maps as already mentioned, but maybe even more importantly when trying to make sense of a difficult MR case and finally when dealing with protein docking. However: 1. In my experience, what at least the better students do is to look at a structure using a simple program like Swiss PDB Viewer or Rasmol and their 300 euro laptop. No arguments can persuade them to use the 3000 euro lab stereo setup -- because they can manage to see what they want to see by just rotating the molecule... 2. For both teaching purposes and publications, I remain an adept of printed stereo pairs. Get each of your students a 5 euro stereo viewer and give them a handout full of stereo pairs rather than mono images. The very important this is that, on paper, one can make notes and drawings. An active digestion of the teaching material (rather than passive starring at your screen) has been known to help efficient learning since long ago... I can summarize my view as follows: for /most/ purposes, you should be fine by using one of the two: simple mono graphics to achieve the 3D effect by rotation -- or printed stereo pairs. HTH Sergei
Thanks for the comments, I do appreciate them. I guess we went off in a direction I wasn't thinking of - related to your personal like or dislike of stereo. What I am really looking for is an answer to a simple question in that is stereo a nice thing from a pedagogy standpoint for showing students complex biomolecules. I am in a chemistry department - undergraduate only. We focus on 3-dimensional shape and the importance of shape of chemical function/reactivity/etc... With small molecules (PF5, etc...), it's easy to see how shape works by simply rotating the molecule. The molecules are small enough, the concept of 3D can be visualized easily in these systems. Furthermore, they can make a simple model using your standard organic or inorganic model kit, no worries. Now, bring in a huge protein, or a protein-protein complex. The issue of 3Dness becomes fuzzier. It's not so easy to see which hydrogen will get plucked off during a chemical reaction, even with careful zooming and mouse manipulation. So my question still is, how many of you feel stereo is important from a pedagogy standpoint (not looking at maps, just structures that are huge and complex). Is it something that we need to try to bring to the classroom, or is it just a cool toy like the 3D TV that hopefully is going nowhere and will soon fade out like the viewmaster of old. I know a large percentage of people cannot see stereo (at least the way we present it), and so it isn't for everybody. But, does it help, and if so, does it help when done in a huge classroom or when put on an individual screen. Has anybody tried to assess this (there's a horrible word for you). That's what I was wondering about. Presenting the stereo is a different issue (how is that done), but I think there are lots of avenues for that depending on your particular situation. Thanks again Dave
