There’s certainly no shortage of structural biology data today, but that doesn’t make it easy to use.
Between technical advances and high-throughput structural genomics, structure databases are stuffed to overflowing with multicolored renderings of proteins, nucleic acids, and macromolecular complexes. As of January 2010, more than 62,000 structures have been deposited in the RCSB Protein Data Bank, more than 50,000 of them since 2000.
Such data have tremendous value, of course. They can guide rational drug design efforts, put genetic mutations into physical context, and identify structural features of interest. But it isn’t easy to extrapolate from published figures alone. “The pictures [in journals] are hard to make sense of,” says Eric Martz, emeritus professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who designs software tools for structure visualization. “They are very complex three-dimensional pictures squashed flat on a page.” Plus, journal figures only highlight features important to the ...
