Development of a Display and Retrieval System for the Protein Data Bank on Sun Microsystems Workstation

Abstract

We developed a molecular graphics system, named “Modrast-P”, which reads coordinates in the Protein Data Bank of Brookhaven National Laboratory format (PDB). This graphics system displays three-dimensional structures of proteins and nucleic acids with various representations and shows molecular models clipped by single plane, double plane, and a cylinder defined arbitrarily. This system runs on the OpenWindows of Sun Microsystems workstation and most functions of it can be operated easily by a mouse or buttons. We also developed an information retrieval system which can seek the target file in CD-ROM by author name, keyword, or amino acid sequence.