PDBe CCDUtils: an RDKit-based toolkit for handling and analysing small molecules in the Protein Data Bank

J Cheminform. 2023 Dec 2;15(1):117. doi: 10.1186/s13321-023-00786-w.

Abstract

While the Protein Data Bank (PDB) contains a wealth of structural information on ligands bound to macromolecules, their analysis can be challenging due to the large amount and diversity of data. Here, we present PDBe CCDUtils, a versatile toolkit for processing and analysing small molecules from the PDB in PDBx/mmCIF format. PDBe CCDUtils provides streamlined access to all the metadata for small molecules in the PDB and offers a set of convenient methods to compute various properties using RDKit, such as 2D depictions, 3D conformers, physicochemical properties, scaffolds, common fragments, and cross-references to small molecule databases using UniChem. The toolkit also provides methods for identifying all the covalently attached chemical components in a macromolecular structure and calculating similarity among small molecules. By providing a broad range of functionality, PDBe CCDUtils caters to the needs of researchers in cheminformatics, structural biology, bioinformatics and computational chemistry.

Keywords: BIRD; CCD; CLC; Covalently Linked Components; Ligand; PDB; PDBx/mmCIF; PRD; Protein structure; Python; RDKit.