What is in the Help Topics Home?

The Help Topics homepage presents documentation about the data, tools, and resources available from RCSB.org. It presents links to website FAQs (frequently asked questions), glossary, short videos introducing various tools and features, and links to training materials on PDB-101, the education portal for RCSB.org.

Why use the Help Topics Home?

You can browse through the page to learn about the types of data available from the RCSB.org website, how to access and use them, along with relevant examples. You can
use the search box on this page to query for specific topics of interest/resources available in the documentation, new articles, and/or in PDB-101 pages.

Help Topics Home page

The Help Topics homepage is organized into 6 topical boxes that present various articles about data, tools, and resources available from RCSB PDB.

* Structural Biology Data - learn about the types of data available from RCSB PDB.
* Search Tools - learn about research focused search tools that use multiple criteria to query the RCSB PDB and find relevant structures.
* Advanced Searching - learn about combining multiple sear criteria.
* Visualize - Interactive 3D structure visualization to examine shapes and interactions, measure distances and angles, and compare structures.
* Explore - learn about detailed biostructure information ranging from small molecule (ligands) to structures (their shapes, annotations, and assemblies), and groups of structures.
* Programmatic Access - learn about data download options and various APIs (Application Programming Interface).

Note: Additional articles (not listed in these boxes) are also available.

Three other boxes presented on this page present relevant articles from the wwPDB website (related to experimental structure data deposition), PDB-101 (related to various learning resources), and video tutorials.

RCSB PDB Help homepage

Query options

At the top of the Help Topics homepage a search box is presented to query the Help topics articles.

As you enter a term or phrase, you will see suggestions listed in a box that appears below the search box. Select suitable options from these suggestions. Alternatively, you can type the search term(s) ignoring the suggestions. A summary of symbols that can be used to combine search terms with Boolean operators is available.

Search Results

The search results are separated into subsections listed in the left-hand menu under: “RCSB PDB”, “News/Announcements”, “PDB101”, and “All” (representing all results).

Examples

1. Search for "allosteric|regulator"
2. Search for "allosteric regulator"
3. Search for "Structure Motif"