PDBMine: A Reformulation of the Protein Data Bank to Facilitate Structural Data Mining

Large scale initiatives such as the Human Genome Project, Structural Genomics, and individual research teams have provided large deposits of genomic and proteomic data. The transfer of data to knowledge has become one of the existing challenges, which is a consequence of capturing data in databases that are optimally designed for archiving and not mining. In this research, we have targeted the Protein Databank (PDB) and demonstrated a transformation of its content, named PDBMine, that reduces storage space by an order of magnitude, and allows for powerful mining in relation to the topic of protein structure determination. We have demonstrated the utility of PDBMine in exploring the prevalence of dimeric and trimeric amino acid sequences and provided a mechanism of predicting protein structure.