Start-up company creates true 3D hologram of proteins

The product is essentially a micro-engineered plastic sheet — but Holoxica is ultimately aiming to build a dynamic display system that can store a number of different holograms graphics and short animations.

Holoxica is a company with connections to several Scottish universities, including St Andrews, Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh, and is headed by optical engineer Javid Kahn. The company produces custom-made holographic prints using a half-a-million pound holographic printer supplied by Lithuanian company Golea.

‘I decided in 2007 that 3D was going to be really big and I was dissatisfied with the state of the art in the field — I decided that I could do it better by going back to basics and trying a different approach,’ said Javid Kahn of Holoxica.

The latest commission is a holographic display of the crystal structure of green fluorescent protein (GFP) — a molecule of special interest to geneticists. Holoxica was able to design the display using information from the online, open-access protein database.