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
ger...@ebi.ac.uk ..................... pdbe.org
Secretary: Pauline Haslam pdbe_ad...@ebi.ac.uk
