Facilities that make the PDB data collection more powerful

Joanna Lange, Coos Baakman, Arthur Pistorius, Elmar Krieger, Rob Hooft, Robbie P. Joosten, Gert Vriend*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

We describe a series of databases and tools that directly or indirectly support biomedical research on macromolecules, with focus on their applicability in protein structure bioinformatics research. DSSP, that determines secondary structures of proteins, has been updated to work well with extremely large structures in multiple formats. The PDBREPORT database that lists anomalies in protein structures has been remade to remove many small problems. These reports are now available as PDF-formatted files with a computer-readable summary. The VASE software has been added to analyze and visualize HSSP multiple sequence alignments for protein structures. The Lists collection of databases has been extended with a series of databases, most noticeably with a database that gives each protein structure a grade for usefulness in protein structure bioinformatics projects. The PDB-REDO collection of reanalyzed and re-refined protein structures that were solved by X-ray crystallography has been improved by dealing better with sugar residues and with hydrogen bonds, and adding many missing surface loops. All academic software underlying these protein structure bioinformatics applications and databases are now publicly accessible, either directly from the authors or from the GitHub software repository.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)330-344
Number of pages15
JournalProtein Science
Volume29
Issue number1
Early online date14 Nov 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2020

Bibliographical note

Special Issue: Tools for Protein Science

Funding

We are thankful to Roman Laskowski, Henning Hermjakob, and many other EBI staff for useful advice. ELIXIR (Europe‐wide) and DTL (in The Netherlands) are strong enabling parties in this field, for which we are grateful. This work is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) Vidi Grant 723.013.003. We thank all researchers who have deposited 3D coordinates of (macro‐)molecules in the PDB. It is understandable that all these data are not publicly available as long as they have clear economic value to their producers, but it would be a pity if these would remain out of the public's eye indefinitely. We realize that depositing so much data would require substantial effort. Therefore, the authors of this article offer to help any industry that wants to upload large numbers of macromolecular structures to wwPDB.

FundersFunder number
DTL
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek723.013.003

    Keywords

    • bioinformatics support
    • DSSP
    • PDB
    • protein structure bioinformatics

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