Kayikci, M. et al. Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41594-017-0019-z (2018).

The adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” certainly applies to protein structure; visualization tools enable researchers from many disciplines to understand how functions are carried out by a protein's unique 3D structure. Though there are many ways of rendering the covalent molecular structure of a protein on a computer screen, noncovalent contacts between atoms—important for folding, stability and function—are challenging to represent. Kayikci et al. present the Protein Contacts Atlas (http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/pca/), a visual resource of noncovalent contacts in more than 100,000 protein crystal structures from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The interactive database offers users many options and plots for visualizing 3D structures at different scales of organization, from an atom to a biological complex, and for visualizing contacts within a single protein or between proteins and ligands.