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Updated: Apr 4, 2026

Characterizing Single-Molecule Conformational Changes Under Shear Flow with Fluorescence Microscopy
Published on: January 25, 2020
MoFlow: visualizing conformational changes in molecules as molecular flow improves understanding
Shareef M Dabdoub1, R Wolfgang Rumpf2, Amber D Shindhelm2
1The Ohio State University Department of Periodontology, Columbus, OH, USA.
Background:
Current visualizations of molecular motion use a Timeline-analogous representation that conveys "first the molecule was shaped like this, then like this...". This scheme is orthogonal to the Pathline-like human understanding of motion "this part of the molecule moved from here to here along this path". We present MoFlow, a system for visualizing molecular motion using a Pathline-analogous representation.
Results:
The MoFlow system produces high-quality renderings of molecular motion as atom pathlines, as well as interactive WebGL visualizations, and 3D printable models. In a preliminary user study, MoFlow representations are shown to be superior to canonical representations for conveying molecular motion.
Conclusions:
Pathline-based representations of molecular motion are more easily understood than timeline representations. Pathline representations provide other advantages because they represent motion directly, rather than representing structure with inferred motion.
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