MolMovDB

MolMovDB catalogs animated "morphs" of solved macromolecular structures and provides classified, quantitative representations of conformational changes to enable analysis of macromolecular flexibility.

Key Features:

• Collection of Morphs: An organized repository of animated "morphs" representing alternative solved states of macromolecules that provides quantitative measures of flexibility and graphical visualizations.
• Classification and Annotation: Motions are classified by conformational-change types such as "hinged domain" and "allosteric" and are accompanied by textual annotations linked to literature.
• Statistical Analysis Tools: Support for creating subsets of morphs and deriving distributions of motional quantities (e.g., maximum rotation) to contextualize specific motions within a population.
• Morph Server Enhancements: A morph server accepts contributed morphs derived from user data or the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and supports nucleic acid structures and multi-chain complexes.

Scientific Applications:

• Visualization and quantitative analysis of conformational change: Enables visualization and quantitative characterization of conformational changes across proteins and RNA using animated morphs and graphical metrics.
• Mechanistic interpretation of molecular function: Supports investigation of molecular motions relevant to enzyme activity, ligand binding, and signal transduction by linking morphs to functional context and literature.
• Comparative population analyses: Facilitates statistical comparison of motional properties to identify typical versus atypical motions within defined subsets.

Methodology:

The resource curates animated morphs derived from solved structures, systematically classifies them by the nature of their conformational changes, links annotations to relevant literature, provides statistical tools to compute distributions of motional quantities for defined subsets, and accepts contributed morphs via a morph server (including PDB-derived, nucleic acid, and multi-chain complex morphs).