Codon Rarity 3D Viewer

[Alpha testing version] — 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: Upload a PDB structure and sequence, 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 Optimisation & Harmonisation

Two Approaches:
Optimisation: Replace codons with the most common synonymous codons in the expression organism (maximises expression).
Harmonisation: Match codon rarity patterns between source and expression organisms (aims to opreserve co-translational folding).

Codon Usage Tables

Upload 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.