About PIDD

        PIDD is a database for the study of protein inter-atomic distance distribution. Currently, the distances are extracted from the protein structures determined through X-ray Crystallography, but they could also be obtained from NMR structural models. The known structures with the resolution higher than 2A and less than 70% sequence similarities are selected. Each type of distances is  specified in terms of the types of the atoms it involves, the types of the residues containing the atoms, and the types of the residues in between the two end residues in sequence. An automated system is built to generate and process the data dynamically. The system  consists of two levels of databases. The first one stores the sequence and structure information for a large set of high-resolution protein structures, with a similar data structure as the structural data represented in the PDB Data Bank. The second one stores the information for the distance distributions, with each record corresponding to a distribution function. The second database is built dynamically from the first one. The database can provide structural information in terms of distance distributions to structural biologists. Such information can be valuable for the study of many fundamental biological problems including protein structure prediction and determination, protein dynamics simulation, molecular design, protein structural analysis and classification, etc.

Contact:

Supervisor: Dr. Zhijun Wu (zhijun@iastate.edu)

Database manager: Di Wu (diwu@iastate.edu)