Allen Integrated Cell is a powerful tool for visualizing biology in 3D

What does a cell look like? If you had to draw one, you’d probably do the usual thing: a sort of fried egg with a nucleus yolk and a couple of ribosomes peppered around, maybe a rough endoplasmic reticulum if you’re fancy. But cells are vastly more complicated than that, not to mention three-dimensional.

Allen Integrated Cell is a new tool that lets anyone visualize cells the way they actually exist in the body. It’s from the Allen Institute for Cell Science, a Seattle research outfit founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen . The institute has been doing research in this direction for some time, but today is the first public release of the Integrated Cell program, which you can try on the web right here.

Source: techcrunch.com