For the fullerene spool, most people tend to animate precious metals or metallish things or sometimes just ANY things like this with a simple diagonal light sweep/glint. A slightly brighter pass on the highlights that just occasionally swipes over the image as a diagonal line of brighter reflections, which says "hey, this is special and fancy".
Not sure whether you think that's worth the effort, but that would be how I would do it.
Lovely animations in general. They look so good now!
