3DinSight: An Integrated Database and Search Tool for Structure, Function and Property of Biomolecules

In order to understand many biological phenomena, it is critical to get insight into the relationship among structure, function and property of biomolecules. However, it is usually di cult to infer the relation from individual data, since we usually need to examine several databases and literatures to obtain the necessary information. It would be useful to have an integrated database where one can examine the relationship among structure, function and property. There are some services available in the Internet to link various databases, but the relational information of biomolecular structure, function and property is rather scarce. 3DinSight is an integrated database, search and visualization tool for structure, function and property of biomolecules, developed to help researchers to get insight into their relationship [1]. Various kinds of searches can be carried out though WWW interfaces. The locations of motif sequences and mutations are automatically mapped on the structure, and visualized by interactive viewers, VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) and RasMol, where the mapped 3D objects are hyper-linked to the corresponding document data. Also, the thermodynamic data of proteins and mutants are integrated into 3DinSight. The amino-acid properties of a molecule, together with structural and functional information, can be displayed as a graph plot. 3DinSight is freely accessible through the Internet (http://www.rtc.riken.go.jp/3DinSight.html).