ProteinDBS v2.0: a web server for global and local protein structure search

ProteinDBS v2.0 is a web server designed for efficient and accurate comparisons and searches of structurally similar proteins from a large-scale database. It provides two comparison methods, global-to-global and local-to-local, to facilitate the searches of protein structures or substructures. ProteinDBS v2.0 applies advanced feature extraction algorithms and scalable indexing techniques to achieve a high-running speed while preserving reasonably high precision of structural comparison. The experimental results show that our system is able to return results of global comparisons in seconds from a complete Protein Data Bank (PDB) database of 152 959 protein chains and that it takes much less time to complete local comparisons from a non-redundant database of 3276 proteins than other accurate comparison methods. ProteinDBS v2.0 supports query by PDB protein ID and by new structures uploaded by users. To our knowledge, this is the only search engine that can simultaneously support global and local comparisons. ProteinDBS v2.0 is a useful tool to investigate functional or evolutional relationships among proteins. Moreover, the common substructures identified by local comparison can be potentially used to assist the human curation process in discovering new domains or folds from the ever-growing protein structure databases. The system is hosted at http://ProteinDBS.rnet.missouri.edu.