PDBlocal: A web-based tool for local inspection of biological macromolecular 3D structures

Abstract

Functional research on biological macromolecules must focus on specific local regions. PDBlocal is a web-based tool developed to overcome the limitations of traditional molecular visualization tools for three-dimensional (3D) inspection of local regions. PDBlocal provides an intuitive and easy-to-manipulate web page interface and some new useful functions. It can keep local regions flashing, display sequence text that is dynamically consistent with the 3D structure in local appearance under multiple local manipulations, use two scenes to help users inspect the same local region with different statuses, list all historical manipulation statuses with a tree structure, allow users to annotate regions of interest, and save all historical statuses and other data to a web server for future research. PDBlocal has met expectations and shown satisfactory performance for both expert and novice users. This tool is available at http://labsystem.scuec.edu.cn/pdblocal/ .