New tools and resources for analysing protein structures and their interactions

The determination of protein structures has furthered our understanding of how various proteins perform their functions. With the large number of stru ctures currently available in the PDB, it is necessary to be able to easily study these proteins in detail. Here new software tools are presented whic h aim to facilitate this analysis; these include the PDBsum WWW site which provides a summary description of all PDB entries, the programs TOPS and NU CPLOT to plot schematic diagrams representing protein topology and DNA-bind ing interactions, SAS a WWW-based sequence-analysis tool incorporating stru ctural data, and WWW servers for the analysis of protein-protein interfaces and analyses of over 300 haem-binding proteins.