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Streamlining Access to RCSB PDB APIs with Python: Sequence and Models

Webinar hosted by RCSB PDB and the Rutgers Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (RAD) Collaboratory | May 19, 2026

This webinar offers an advanced look at and demonstration of using the rcsb-api Python package, which enables researchers to easily interact with even more RCSB PDB APIs—including Sequence and Models API services.

Using the Sequence API, users can query sequence alignment and annotation data from a variety of external resources. The Models API helps users extract selected structure and ligand coordinates from data files.

Course Objectives and Intended Audiences

After watching the videos in this course, you will be able to:

Understand the fundamentals of RCSB PDB APIs and their application
Access sequence-level annotations and alignments with the Sequence Coordinates API and rcsb-api Python package
Fetch model coordinate data and extract out specific slices or ligands of large structures using the Models API and rcsb-api Python package
Learn advanced use cases of the search and data APIs using the rcsb-api Python package
Group search results by sequence similarity and other conditions using the rcsb-api Python package

This course is intended for:

Software developers who access PDB data
Bioinformatics and/or structural biology researchers
Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in biological sciences
Faculty members and professionals who utilize PDB data

Additional Resources

Colab Notebooks
Presentation
Python Package Documentation
rcsb-api: Python Toolkit for Streamlining Access to RCSB Protein Data Bank APIs (2025) Journal of Molecular Biology doi: 10.1016/j.jmb.2025.168970