PDBe-KB COVID-19 data portal – supporting rapid coronavirus research
Sameer S Velankar · Acta Crystallographica Section A Foundations and Advances · 2021
The PDBe-KB COVID-19 data portal, developed by the team at Protein Data Bank in Europe Knowledge Base (PDBe-KB), aggregates all the available structure data from SARS-CoV-2 structures in the PDB, to help researchers easily identify important structural features to support the development of treatments and vaccines.Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented number of scientific efforts have taken place worldwide in order to help combat the SARS-CoV-2 virus.One of the biggest challenges during this fast-moving situation was to share data and findings in a coordinated way and ensure this was available to any researchers who needed it.To support research efforts to understand more about the SARS-CoV virus and the structures of its proteins, we created dedicated PDBe-KB pages to highlight important structural features of PDB entries and allow easy download of all relevant data files.These pages highlight ligand binding sites and residues involved in protein-protein interactions through visualisation tools, including a new structure superimposition feature.These pages help researchers to easily identify common features from all the available structure data, supporting drug and vaccine development.