PIMA: Protein-Protein interactions in Macromolecular Assembly - a web server for its Analysis and Visualization

Protein-protein interactions are essential for the basic biological machinery of the cell. This is important for processes like protein synthesis, enzyme kinetics, molecular assembly and signal transduction. A high number of macromolecular structural complexes are known due to recent advances in structure determination techniques. Therefore, it is of interest to develop an interactive tool to objectively analyze large protein complexes. Hence, we describe the development and utility of a web enabled application named 'Protein-Protein Interaction in Macro-molecular Assembly' (PIMA) for the analysis of large protein assemblies. The intricate details of physical interactions amongst protein subunits in a large complex are presented as simple user preferred interactive network diagrams.