Overview

Key jargon:

• Render - Displaying data to user.
• Adapter - Converting data into a format ProtVista can use.
• Attribute - Settings/piece of data attached to an element.
• Payload - Data sent or received in a request.
• Schema - Description of what type of data can be allocated where.
• Mount - Adding a component to a page.
• Intent - What you want a system to do.
• Representation - Way something is shown/described.

ProtVista is a web component — a custom HTML element, <protvista-uniprot> — that draws protein sequence features as horizontal tracks aligned to the amino-acid sequence: domains, variants, binding sites, structure coverage, AlphaFold confidence, and more. You give it a UniProt accession (a protein identifier such as P05067) and, optionally, a config describing which tracks to show and where their data comes from.

The playground: edit a configuration on the left, see it render on the right.

Beneath the tracks, ProtVista also renders the protein’s known 3D structures, so a feature you can see along the sequence can be looked at in space. The 3D view is rendered by Mol*, reached through Nightingale’s structure component:

The 3D pane beneath the tracks, showing the experimental PDB entry 1AAP for P05067.

Because it’s a standard custom element, it drops into any page — plain HTML, React, Vue, Angular — with a <script> tag and no build step. You do not need to know the underlying rendering library or name any internal components: you describe what to show in a small YAML or JSON document, and ProtVista resolves that to the right components, data adapters, and layout for you.

Who it’s for

If you’re a scientist who wants to look at a protein without writing code, open the playground, type an accession, and explore. If you’re a bioinformatician bringing your own annotations, you can load a CSV, TSV, JSON, or BED file alongside the live UniProt tracks — see Load your own data. And if you’re a developer embedding the viewer in an application, add the element, author a config, and wire up events; start with Embed the viewer.

Find your path

New to ProtVista? Take the end-to-end Tutorial, which walks from an empty page to a custom, themed viewer in four steps. For the pieces on their own, see Embed the viewer and then Author a config. Bringing your own data? Go straight to Load your own data.

For more specific questions:

• What does each track type draw? See Built-in track kinds.
• How does a config relate to what a provider supplies? Read Configuration vs data.
• Validating configs or working at scale? Point your editor at the config JSON Schema.
• Need more than the built-ins? See the Escape hatches.
• Something not rendering? Check Troubleshoot errors.

Tools & resources

• Playground — edit a config live, see it render, share it via a link.
• Playground — dev examples — the same, seeded with tricky proteins for eyeballing edge cases.
• Starter Kit — a no-build template repository to copy and go.
• Feature record schema — machine-readable schema for bring-your-own data.
• Source & issues — component source, schema, and tracker.

Licensed under CC BY 4.0.