IHMValidation: Assessment of Integrative Structure Models Deposited to the Protein Data Bank

PDB-IHM is a branch of the Protein Data Bank (PDB), a Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) Core Archive, that expands its scope by allowing for additional biomolecular structure representations and types of experimental information (i.e., integrative/hybrid structure models). As of October 2025, PDB-IHM contained 374 entries, benefitting from multi-scale and multi-state representations and 17 types of experimental data. These structure models are assigned PDB accession codes and are archived alongside other experimental structures in the PDB. Rigorous interpretation of a structure model requires assessment of underlying data quality, consistency with the input data, and estimates of positional uncertainty of its components. Herein, we present the IHMValidation pipeline (https://validate.pdb-ihm.org; https://github.com/salilab/IHMValidation) based on recommendations from the wwPDB Integrative Methods Task Force plus the small-angle scattering (SAS), chemical crosslinking mass spectrometry (crosslinking-MS), and cryo-electron microscopy and tomography (3DEM) communities. The IHMValidation report (available in both PDF and HTML formats) comprises six sections: (i) overview; (ii) model details; (iii) data quality assessments; (iv) local geometry assessments (i.e., model quality); (v) fit of the model to the data used to generate it; and (vi) fit of the model to the data used for validation. Future expansions of the IHMValidation pipeline will: (i) reflect recommendations coming from additional experimental communities, including Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) and hydrogen/deuterium exchange MS (HDX-MS); (ii) include other validation criteria, such as Bayesian likelihoods for the data; and (iii) represent estimates of structure model uncertainty based on the variation among alternative models satisfying input data.