Level of life
Protein
A chain of amino acids folded into a working shape. Proteins act as enzymes, structures, signals and transporters.
Protein structure
Atomic models of proteins, first solved by X-ray crystallography, are shared openly through the Protein Data Bank.Source: Kendrew et al., 1958Source: Berman et al., 2000Source: RCSB
Idea or model
How Protein structure connects
Protein structure describes
Protein structure is described by
Technology or method
Protein structure prediction
Predicting a protein's three-dimensional shape from its sequence. AlphaFold made accurate predictions possible for many proteins.
Protein structure is found in
Technology or method
Biological databases
Public archives such as GenBank for sequences, UniProt for proteins and the Protein Data Bank for structures.
Protein structure is related to
Process
Protein folding
A protein's amino acid sequence determines the three-dimensional shape it folds into, and that shape lets it work.
Studied in
Your progress
Sources & further reading
The explanations on this page are our own summaries of these sources. Follow a link to read the original; if anything here disagrees with it, the original wins. How we choose and check sources.
A three-dimensional model of the myoglobin molecule obtained by x-ray analysis (opens the original in a new tab)
Kendrew JC, Bodo G, Dintzis HM, et al. (1958). Nature 181:662-666.
Historical paperPrimary researchThe Protein Data Bank (opens the original in a new tab)
Berman HM, Westbrook J, Feng Z, et al. (2000). Nucleic Acids Research 28:235-242.
Peer-reviewedPrimary researchRCSB Protein Data Bank (opens the original in a new tab)
RCSB PDB. rcsb.org.
DatabaseResearch institute