Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 11, 2025

Investigating Protein Sequence-structure-dynamics Relationships with Bio3D-web
Published on: July 16, 2017
RCSB Protein Data Bank: improved annotation, search and visualization of membrane protein structures archived in the
Sebastian Bittrich1, Yana Rose1, Joan Segura1
1Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Motivation:
Membrane proteins are encoded by approximately one fifth of human genes but account for more than half of all US FDA approved drug targets. Thanks to new technological advances, the number of membrane proteins archived in the PDB is growing rapidly. However, automatic identification of membrane proteins or inference of membrane location is not a trivial task.
Results:
We present recent improvements to the RCSB Protein Data Bank web portal (RCSB PDB, rcsb.org) that provide a wealth of new membrane protein annotations integrated from four external resources: OPM, PDBTM, MemProtMD and mpstruc. We have substantially enhanced the presentation of data on membrane proteins. The number of membrane proteins with annotations available on rcsb.org was increased by ∼80%. Users can search for these annotations, explore corresponding tree hierarchies, display membrane segments at the 1D amino acid sequence level, and visualize the predicted location of the membrane layer in 3D.
Availability And Implementation:
Annotations, search, tree data and visualization are available at our rcsb.org web portal. Membrane visualization is supported by the open-source Mol* viewer (molstar.org and github.com/molstar/molstar).
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Protein Organization
The primary structure of a protein is its amino acid sequence....
Globular and Fibrous Proteins
Globular proteins are also known as spheroproteins and typically are approximately round in shape. They contain a mix of amino acid types and contain differing sequences in their primary structures. Globular proteins have many different functions, such as enzymes, cellular messengers, and molecular transporters. These roles often require the proteins to be...
Gene Families
Occasionally these regions can be adapted to take on new roles within the organism, becoming novel genes...
Introduction to Membrane Proteins

