Nucleic Acid Structure Database

9510703 Berman The award will support the continued development of the Nucleic Acid Database, a database of three-dimensional structures of oligonucleotides and nucleic acids. The goals of the project are to devise an easily accessible and user friendly resource that serves a broad, international group of users including crystallographers, theoreticians, modelers and other researchers interested in such structures. The goals of the project are to expand the scope of the database and to refine existing and develop new, user-friendly software that facilitate data entry and research on the database, rather than simply on individual entries. The expansion of scope will allow the database to accept direct entry by researchers of structural data on nucleic acids determined by x-ray crystallography. The database will continue to cooperate closely with the Protein DataBank at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and will now itself include structural information on proteins and protein-nucleic acid complexes derived from the Protein DataBank. In addition, the database will provide the first extensive test of the use of the mmCIF, a new, information-rich format for structural data on macromolecules that is expected to become a standard format for such data. ***