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)

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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 (slow 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 (preserves co-translational folding).

Codon Usage Tables

Upload Custom Codon Table

Format: TSV file with columns: Codon, AminoAcid, Frequency (or Usage). The frequency should be between 0 and 1, representing the relative usage of each codon.