TSRI's Metalloprotein site Database and Browser (MDB) contains quantitative information on all the metal-containing sites available from structures in the PDB distribution. This database contains geometrical and molecular information that allows the classification and search of particular combinations of site characteristics, and answer questions such as: "How many mononuclear zinc-containing sites are five coordinate with X-ray resolution better than 1.8 Angstroms?", and then be able to visualize and manipulate the matching sites. The database also includes enough information to answer questions involving type and number of ligands (e.g. "at least 2 His"), and include distance cutoff criteria (e.g. "a metal-ligand distance no more than 3.0 Angstroms and no less than 2.2 Angstroms"). 

This database is being developed as part of a project whose ultimate goal is metalloprotein design, allowing the interactive visualization of geometrical and functional information garnered from the MDB. The database is created by automatic recognition and extraction of metal-binding sites from metal-containing proteins. Quantitative information is extracted and organized into a searchable form, by iterating through all the entries in the latest PDB release (at the moment: September 2001). This is a comprehensive quantitative database, which exists in SQL format and contains information on about 5,500 proteins.

The MDB has 3 web-based interfaces.
1. The interactive interface: A frames based interface that allows interactive searching and display of the results, via the CCMS/TSRI java-based macromolecular viewer.
2. An HTML forms interface: Three forms that will allow you to perform complex searches of the MDB. The results are shown as a list, with appropriate links that allow downloading of the VRML 2.0 or PDB formatted structure files corresponding to the metal site, an option to see the site in the java viewer, and a link to the web page of the corresponding protein at the PDB site.
3. An SQL interface:Allows you to type straight SQL statements to perform sophisticated searches of the MDB.