Protein Design Viz (PDV): lightweight protein structure visualization studio with validated quantitative analytics and antibody-specific toolkit

Abstract

Motivation: Molecular visualization is dominated by two families of software. Desktop programs such as PyMOL, VMD and UCSF ChimeraX are powerful but heavy to install and operate. Web viewers such as Jmol, 3Dmol.js, NGL, Mol* and iCn3D are light and installation-free, but typically stop at rendering, lacking deeper functionality needed for even basic protein sequence, structural analyses and design tasks. Tools building upon these often lack comprehensive sequence/structure manipulation, surface, interface and antibody-specific analytics functionality or require an external backend. There is a need for a tool that is as frictionless as a web viewer yet carries the analytical depth normally reserved for the desktop or the command line software. Results: We present Protein Design Viz (PDV), a self-contained molecular visualization studio delivered as a single offline HTML file that runs entirely in the browser. Built as an extensive modification of 3Dmol.js, PDV combines a full visualization workflow: multi-object scenes, representations, coloring palette, linked sequence track, publication-quality outline rendering and portable sessions. Additionally we re-implemented four commonly used macromolecular analyses measures from scratch in client-side JavaScript: a Shrake-Rupley solvent-accessible surface area (SASA) engine, an antibody numbering and germline-assignment engine, a non-covalent interaction detector, and a developability-liability scanner. Each engine is validated against its established reference. PDV's SASA reproduces FreeSASA at Pearson r {approx} 0.997-0.998 across 2,582 structures spanning proteins, nucleic acids and ligands; its numbering reproduces RIOT for over 99.88% of 1.3 million residue positions across 16,996 sequences and four schemes; its interaction detector reproduces PLIP at macro-F1 0.82, matching Arpeggio as closely as PLIP itself does. PDV brings validated, quantitative structural analysis into a no-install, simple to use tool. Availability and implementation: PDV is a single HTML file, free for noncommercial use under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0, available from pdv.naturalantibody.com. It requires only a WebGL-capable browser and runs fully offline.