One major driver behind our vision was to hide much of the complexity associated with protein modeling behind a simple and easy-to-use interface, thereby providing a very large community of scientists with the possibility to gain insights into the 3D structure of the proteins they are studying, without the need to learn and purchase complex and expensive software.

There are probably four major factors contributing to the citation record. First, the server is easy to use, as the Web-interface takes away most of the complexity normally associated with protein modeling. Second, the Swiss-PdbViewer, which is available for most relevant computer platforms (MS, MAC, LINUX, and SGI), has many powerful and easy-to-use features developed by modelers for modelers. Third, the uninterrupted operations for 13 years allows over 50,000 users to build over 180,000 models and access nearly 1 million models available in the SWISS-MODEL Repository every year. And finally, Swiss-PdbViewer has an active user community kindly and efficiently coordinated by Gale Rhodes of the University of Southern Maine.

While the members of the original team moved on to new positions, the collaboration is still ongoing, and all three components of the environment are regularly upgraded and improved from an algorithmic, technical, and user interface perspective. I would, however, like to point out two significant developments by the group of Torsten Schwede at the University of Basel: first, a Web-based personal workspace which assists and guides the user in building protein homology models at different levels of complexity; and second, a completely reworked SWISS-MODEL Repository which now contains nearly 1 million model structures accompanied by detailed information about the target protein, the model building process, and model quality assessment.

As a team we are particularly thankful to Timothy N.C. Wells (GlaxoWellcome, now at Merck-Serono), Jonathan C.K. Knowles (GlaxoWellcome, now at Roche), and Allan Baxter (GlaxoSmithKline) who have established the necessary environment for this project. Furthermore we are deeply indebted to Stanley K. Burt, Robert W. Lebherz, and Jack R. Collins as well as the whole staff at the Advanced Biomedical Computing Center at NCI-Frederick (Frederick, MD, USA) for their continuing support and operating the US mirror of the SWISS-MODEL server.

  If you are free to talk about it, what are your current projects?

In my current activities, I mainly focus on systems biology and the integration of experimental and mathematical approaches to the study of signaling networks. These include proteomics, computational systems biology, and text mining. I do, however, still collaborate with Torsten Schwede on SWISS-MODEL, Swiss-PdbViewer, and projects to employ GRID-based computing to accelerate high-throughput docking of small molecules into the binding pockets of protein structures.