World's Largest Video Protein Database Promises Rapid Drug Development
Proteins in Motion Image courtesy of Institute for Research in Biomedicine-IRB A new database developed by Spanish biologists is giving pharmaceutical quick access to protein structure data that could lead to more rapid development of important biologic drugs. The database, known as MoDEL, contains protein motion data for more than 1,700 different human proteins, making it the largest such database of proteins in the world. Developed through intensive supercomputer calculations at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine tapped into the international Protein Data Bank (PDB) to create the new video database. Each of the 1,700 proteins catalogued there is displayed through a series of 10,000 to 100,000 photos, showing how the higher order structures of complex proteins move and change. And while 1,700 proteins out of 40,000 may not seem like a lot, many of the proteins logged in the PDB are highly similar -...