A Protein Structure Data and Analysis System

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a protein structure data and analysis system that is only used in the lab for analyzing the proprietary data. It is capable of storing public protein data, such as the data in Protein Data Bank (PDB) [1], and life scientists' proprietary data. This toolkit is targeted at life scientists who want to maintain proprietary protein structure data (may be incomplete), to search and query publicly known protein structures and to compare their structure data with others. The comparison functions can be used to find structure differences between two proteins at atom level, especially in mutant versions of proteins. The system can also be used as a tool of choosing better protein structure template in new protein's tertiary structure prediction. The system is developed in Java and the protein data is stored in a relational database (Oracle 9i).