Draw cycles with circular arrows

Overview

In this video, we're going to show you how to use perfectly circular arrows and lines. And there are many reasons why you'd wanna use circular arrows and lines in a diagram. One being creating feedback loops, another being maybe creating a plasmid diagram, and another could be something like a cyclical motion. 

So I'm going to create a perfectly circular arrow by coming up here to the insert line tab. And you'll notice that we've got curved arrows for example, this one that does look like a part of a circle, but it actually does behave a little bit differently. You can create more of a wavy line like so or, you know, of course, bring it back to being a perfectly linear line by removing the nose.

Our circular arrows do behave a little bit differently. They're in this category here, and you'll notice that it follows a perfectly 360 degree angle if you drag it out, so I'm going to drag out a circular arrow. And now I cannot necessarily create a wavy line from this, but I can create a perfectly 360 degree circle with my mouse no matter how you know, unsteady my hand is. It's going to follow this perfect circular route. Okay. And what I can also do is navigate to this white node along the path of this circular arrow.

And what you noticed is that my mouse turned into a pair of scissors. When I rolled over that white little dot. And what that's gonna do is exactly that. It's going to snip it in place. So I'm going to click my mouse down. And what that did is it kind of created this grouped icon where 2 of these arrows now are still in line. They're still along the same exact path, but they're actually 2 separate arrows.

And so what I could do is adjust the tip and the tail like so. I mean, you create a perfect third. That's a possibility here. And now this might be useful again if you're creating some sort of cyclical pathway like so. We're going to double click to exit this grouped icon. There we go. I can also obviously change the thickness of this arrow like so. I can change the thickness or size of the arrow head. And of course, the color because it still behaves like any other lines. And now just to add to this figure, I'm going to actually include maybe some numbers here, maybe a 1, a2, like so, and a 3.

There you go, creating sort of a perfect or cyclical motion. If you wanna show some sort of cyclical pattern or behavior. I finish off this diagram here for the feedback loop. Same deal, kind of align the tip of that arrow to be flush to the bottom. I'm going to snip it at the top and then maybe change the arrow head to be an inhibitor line because in this case, it is talking about inhibition.

Perhaps make the arrowheads a bit larger, like so, and then change the thickness of the line. So a little bit more visible. And I could even change the color. There we go. Alright. And then finally, of course, you can create beautiful plasmids with the environment are using our perfectly circular arrows and lines.

I've just searched Plasmid here in our Icon library, and I'm presented with several different premade, plasmid diagrams. So I'm just going to grab this one here. It looks like it is a grouped icon and basically what I can do is maybe I'll ungroup it actually, so I'm going to right click and ungroup.

There we go. And now I can kind of change the size of each of these segments. And you can see here that it follows that perfect 360 degree angle as needed. And if I want to add another segment, all I have to do is click it and then it will snip right where I've clicked my mouse. There we go. Alright. And so that's 3 different ways that I would use circular arrows and lines in BioRender.