You have probably seen these animations at some point, but if not, I encourage you to check them out. They certainly make abstractions such as DNA → RNA → Protein "come to life." Below you have transcription, and then translation.
Though the DNA replication visualization is probably the most impressive to me:
The Walter & Eliza Hall Institution of Medical Research has about a dozen animations of this sort. Molecular Movies has a great many, though some of them are more like animated GIFs. Much respect for this group for putting these videos out there, as I see them being used without attribution all over YouTube (with different voice overs, etc.). In population and phylogenetics visuzliation of complex data has become extremely important in imparting understanding even to specialist audiences. One of the problems for me in relation to molecular genetics papers has always been that verbal description and static schematic figures often do not capture in vivid enough detail the models being outlined. It seems that in the future better visualization tools might allow for more ubiquitous utilizations of three dimensional animation to illustrate structural mechanistic models.
