The NDB (Nucleic Acid Database) is a valuable resource dedicated to “information about experimentally-determined nucleic acids and complex assemblies.” Over the years, however, I’ve gradually switched from NDB to PDB (Protein Data Bank) for my research on nucleic acid structures. NDB is derived from PDB and presumably should contain all nucleic acid structures available in the PDB. However, at the time of this writing (on April 9, 2015), the NDB says: “As of 8-Apr-2015 number of released structures: 7430” and the PDB states “7611 Nucleic Acid Containing Structures”. So PDB has 7611-7430=181 more entries of nucleic acid structures than the NDB, possibly due to a lag in NDB’s processing of newly released PDB structures. Another issue is the inconsistency of the NDB identifier: early entries have e.g. bdl084 for B-DNA (355d in PDB), but now NDB seems to use the same id as the PDB (e.g., 4p5j).
The RCSB PDB maintains a weekly-updated, summary file named pdb_entry_type.txt in pure text format (check here for a list of useful summary files), containing “List of all PDB entries, identification of each as a protein, nucleic acid, or protein-nucleic acid complex and whether the structure was determined by diffraction or NMR.” An excerpt of the file is shown below:
108m prot diffraction 109d nuc diffraction 109l prot diffraction 109m prot diffraction 10gs prot diffraction 10mh prot-nuc diffraction 110d nuc diffraction 110l prot diffraction ................................. 102m prot diffraction 103d nuc NMR
Specifically, a nucleic acid structure contains the (sub)string nuc in the second field, where prot-nuc means a protein-RNA/DNA complex. This text file is trivial to parse, and the atomic coordinates files (in PDB or PDBx/mmCIF format) for all nucleic acid structures can be automatically downloaded from the RCSB PDB using a script.
It is worth noting that DSSR is checked against all nucleic acid structures in the PDB at the time of each release to ensure that it does not crash. I update my local copy of nucleic acid structures each week, and run DSSR on the new entries. This process not only provides me an opportunity to keep pace with new developments in the field but also allows me to keep refining DSSR as needs arise.
