MMDB: Entrez's 3D-structure database

dimensional structures are now known within most protein families and it is likely, when searching a sequence database, that one will identify a homolog of known structure. The goal of Entrez' s 3D- structure database is to make structure information and the functional annotation it can provide easily accessible to molecular biologists. To this end, Entrez' s search engine provides several powerful features: ( i) links between databases, for example between a protein s sequence and structure; ( ii) precomputed sequence and structure neighbors; and ( iii) structure and sequence/ structure alignment visualization. Here, we focus on a new feature of Entrez' s Molecular Modeling Database ( MMDB) : Graphical summaries of the biological annotation available for each 3D structure, based on the results of automated comparative analysis. MMDB is available at: http: / / www. ncbi. nlm. nih. gov/ Entrez/ structure. html.