Codon Rarity 3D Viewer

Visualise rare codons — hypothesised as co-translational folding bottlenecks in protein structures

Created by Keiran Rowell assisted by Claude Sonnet 4.5 prompting | Codon frequency data from CodonStatsDB (Subramanian et al., 2022, Mol. Biol. Evol.)

Source DB: Uniprot → Structure

Source DB: Uniprot → Nucleotide Sequence

Initializing...
How it works: Load a PDB structure and sequence into your browser (locally), select an organism to see rare codons highlighted in red–orange. Differential mode compares rarity between two organisms.
Blue = becomes more common
Red = becomes rarer in target organism.

Codon Rarity Colour Scale

Very rare (suspected slower translation) Common (normal)

Codon Maximisation & Harmonisation

Two Approaches
Maximisation: Replace codons with the single most common synonymous codon in the expression organism (not optimal for expression due to repetition, GC content, structural constraints, etc.).
Harmonisation: Match codon rarity patterns between source and expression organisms (aims to preserve co-translational folding).

Codon Usage Tables

Load Custom Codon Table

Format:

TSV file

Columns: Codon | AminoAcid | Frequency
The frequency should be between 0 and 1, representing the relative usage of each codon per target amino acid.