Bridging the Gap

The field of structural biology is expanding at a remarkable pace. One of the driving forces is the increased number of structures that are being published and submitted to structural repositories, including the Protein Data Bank. The figure below illustrates the increasing rate of structural deposition at the PDB. With the advent of a number of structural genomics initiatives worldwide, these numbers will only increase in the near future.

The "gap" is the difference between a printed publication, which contains static images and web presentations, which can include some very powerful structural views and animations, using tools like MDL's Chime. This is demonstrated by the juxtaposition of two images of acetylcholinesterase (PDB ID 1ACJ) as seen below.

Static Image	Dynamic Image

There are many excellent web sites that have detailed images of macromolecular structure (See Eric Martz's excellent work at the University of Massachusetts). BioEditor is designed to go one step further - to enable users to fully annotate a structure by integrating text, graphics, sequence, and dynamic structure - in a single document or set of documents.