Tutorial: Structures and PDB I/O

Protein Structures

The csb.bio.structure module defines some of the most fundamental abstractions in the library: Structure, Chain, Residue and Atom. Instances of these objects may exist independently and that is perfectly fine, but usually they are part of a Composite aggregation. The root node in this Composite is a Structure (or Ensemble). Structure-s are composed of Chain-s, and each Chain is a collection of Residue-s. The leaf nodes are Atom-s.

All of these objects implement the base AbstractEntity interface. Therefore, every node in the Composite can be transformed:

>>> r, t = [rotation matrix](rotation-matrix), [translation vector](translation-vector)
>>> entity.transform(r, t)

and it knows its immediate children:

>>> entity.items
<iterator>    # over all immediate child entities

If you want to traverse the complete Composite tree, starting at arbitrary level, and down to the lowest level, use one of the CompositeEntityIterators. Or just call AbstractEntity.components():

>>> entity.components()
<iterator>   # over all descendants, of any type, at any level
>>> entity.components(klass=Residue)
<iterator>   # over all Residue descendants

Some of the inner objects in this hierarchy behave just like dictionaries (but are not):

>>> structure.chains['A']('A')       # access chain A by ID
<Chain A: Protein>
>>> structure['A']('A')              # the same
<Chain A: Protein>
>>> residue.atoms['CS']('CS')          
<Atom: CA>                      # access an atom by its name
>>> residue.atoms['CS']('CS')          
<Atom: CA>                      # the same

Others behave like list collections:

>>> chain.residues[10](10)               # 1-based access to the residues in the chain
<ProteinResidue [10](10): PRO 10>
>>> chain[10](10)                        # 0-based, list-like access
<ProteinResidue [11](11): GLY 11>

Step-wise building of Ensemble-s, Chain-s and Residue-s is supported through a number of append methods, for example:

>>> residue = ProteinResidue(401, ProteinAlphabet.ALA)
>>> s.chains['A']('A').residues.append(residue)

See EnsembleModelsCollection, StructureChainsTable, ChainResiduesCollection and ResidueAtomsTable in our API docs for more details.

Some other objects in this module of potential interest are the self-explanatory SecondaryStructure and TorsionAngles.

PDB I/O

CSB comes with a number of PDB structure parsers, format builders and database providers, all defined in the csb.bio.io.wwpdb package. The most basic usage is:

>>> parser = StructureParser('structure.pdb')
>>> parser.parse_structure()
<Structure>     # a Structure object (model)

or if this is an NMR ensemble:

>>> parser.parse_models()
<Ensemble>      # an Ensemble object (collection of alternative Structure-s)

This module introduces a family of PDB file parsers. The common interface of all parsers is defined in AbstractStructureParser. This class has several implementations:

• RegularStructureParser - handles normal PDB files with SEQRES fields
• LegacyStructureParser - reads structures from legacy or malformed PDB files, which are lacking SEQRES records (initializes all residues from the ATOMs instead)
• PDBHeaderParser - reads only the headers of the PDB files and produces structures without coordinates. Useful for reading metadata (e.g. ccession numbers or just plain SEQRES sequences) with minimum overhead

Unless you have a special reason, you should use the StructureParser factory, which returns a proper AbstractStructureParser implementation, depending on the input PDB file. If the input file looks like a regular PDB file, the factory returns a RegularStructureParser, otherwise it instantiates LegacyStructureParser. StructureParser is in fact an alias for AbstractStructureParser.create_parser.

Writing your own, customized PDB parser is easy. Suppose that you are trying to parse a PDB-like file which misuses the charge column to store custom info. This will certainly crash AbstractStructureParser (for good), but you can create your own parser as a workaround. All you need to do is override the virtual _read_charge_field hook method:

class CustomParser(RegularStructureParser):

    def _read_charge(self, line):
        try:
            return super(CustomParser, self)._read_charge(line)
        except StructureFormatError:
            return None

Another important abstraction in this module is StructureProvider. It has several implementations which can be used to retrieve PDB Structures from various sources: file system directories, remote URLs, etc. You can easily create your own provider as well. See StructureProvider for details.

Finally, this module gives you some FileBuilder-s, used for text serialization of Structure-s and Ensemble-s:

>>> builder = PDBFileBuilder(stream)
>>> builder.add_header(structure)
>>> builder.add_structure(structure)

where stream is any Python stream, e.g. an open file or sys.stdout.