Protein PocketViewer: A Web-Service Based Interface for Protein Pocket Extraction and Visualization

One important problem in bioinformatics is to study pockets or tunnels within the protein structure. These pocket or tunnel regions are significant because they indicate areas of ligand binding or enzymatic reactions, and tunnels are often solvent ion conductance areas. The Protein Pocket Viewer (PPV) is a web interface that allows the user to extract and visualize the protein pockets in a browser, based on the algorithm in [1]. The PPV packaged the pocket extraction executable as a web service, and made it accessible to all users with the Internet access and a modern java enabled browser. The PPV employed the Model2design pattern, which led to a loosely coupled implementation that is more robust and easier to maintain. It consists of a client web interface for user inputs and visualization, a middle-layer for controlling the flow, and the backend web services performing the actual CPU-intensive computation. The PPV web client consists of multiple window regions, with each region providing differing views of the protein, pockets and related information. For a more responsive user experience, the PPV web client employs AJAX for asynchronous execution of long running tasks, like protein pocket extraction. Keywords—protein structure; pockets; Model 2; AJAX; web service; visualization;