[3dem] Introducing PDBprints - salient, at-a-glance info about PDB
entries
Gerard DVD Kleywegt
gerard at xray.bmc.uu.se
Thu Aug 5 08:48:37 PDT 2010
If you were born before the Dutch lost their first World Cup final, you may
remember the days when "everybody" knew that PDB entry 1tim was the structure
of chicken triosephosphate isomerase, 1hhb was human haemoglobin, 1lyz was hen
egg-white lysozyme, etc. Unfortunately, life for a structural biologist is not
that simple any longer. Nevertheless, occasionally it would be very handy to
get at-a-glance information about some of the crucial details of a PDB entry or
a list of entries.
When the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe; pdbe.org) launched its redesigned
website recently, we also introduced PDBlogos and PDBprints. PDBlogos are
stylised, intuitive icons that convey important information about a PDB entry
(e.g., the experimental technique, the source organism of the sample, or the
presence of a ligand). PDBprints (short for "PDB fingerprints") are collections
of PDBlogos displayed in a specific order, where each icon represents a
well-defined category of information (and where clicking on any icon will take
you to a webpage with more information about that aspect of the PDB entry of
interest).
PDBprints are used in a number of places already, e.g.:
- at the top of PDBe's plain-English summary page for every PDB entry (e.g.:
http://pdbe.org/random)
- in lists of PDBe database-search results (e.g.:
http://pdbe.org/advancedsearch?text=homeobox)
- at the top of EDS summary pages (e.g.:
http://eds.bmc.uu.se/cgi-bin/eds/uusfs?pdbCode=1fcc)
A number of other (structural) bioinformatics resources are also considering
incorporating PDBprints on their webpages. In fact, they are very easy to
include in *any* webpage as evidenced by this page:
http://xray.bmc.uu.se/gerard/structures_pdbprints.html
For a five-minute illustrated introduction to PDBprints (including instructions
on how to include them in your own webpages) point your browser to:
http://pdbe.org/pdbprints
We hope that you will find PDBprints useful and we value your feedback.
--Gerard
---
Gerard J. Kleywegt, PDBe, EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK
gerard at ebi.ac.uk ..................... pdbe.org
Secretary: Pauline Haslam pdbe_admin at ebi.ac.uk
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