The Dream Lab Innovations protein logo The Dream Lab Innovations

RBAi Academy

Learn structural biology,
one structure at a time.

A hands-on course in reading real protein structures — using nothing but plain-language prompts in RBAi. Each lesson takes one famous molecule, builds a publication-quality figure, and teaches one big idea you keep for good.

Start Lesson 1 Open RBAi

Free to try · no install · real PDB structures

The hemoglobin tetramer rendered in RBAi: two blue and two red subunits around a central cavity, each holding an orange heme
Made in RBAi — Hemoglobin, PDB 2HHB

Module 1

Structural biology

From reading your first structure to docking a drug and testing a mutation. Each lesson builds on the one before, and each ends with you doing real research in RBAi.

Lessons
6
Time
~73 min
You need
A browser
  1. MDM2 drawn as an opaque light grey-blue surface with its binding groove shaded darker blue, and the orange p53 helix lying in the groove.
    01Reading a structure ~10 min

    From a PDB structure to an annotated figure

    Open a real protein structure in RBAi, highlight the residues that matter, and get a clean, labelled figure — using plain-language prompts, no code and no software to install.

    Start lesson
  2. The hemoglobin tetramer: two alpha subunits in blue and two beta subunits in red, arranged around a central cavity, each carrying an orange heme group with an iron atom.
    02Quaternary structure & cofactors ~12 min

    Hemoglobin: four subunits and the iron that carries oxygen

    Open hemoglobin in RBAi, see how four protein chains assemble into one oxygen carrier, and zoom to the iron atom a single histidine holds in place — all from plain-language prompts.

    Start lesson
  3. Figure from the lesson Inside an active site: how a drug blocks HIV-1 protease
    03Drug in an active site ~12 min

    Inside an active site: how a drug blocks HIV-1 protease

    Open HIV-1 protease with the drug indinavir, find every hydrogen bond and hydrophobic contact, measure the catalytic distances, and see how a transition-state mimic jams the enzyme.

    Start lesson
  4. The p53 core domain as a light-blue cartoon bound to a DNA double helix in light orange, with the side chains of Arg248 and Arg273 as teal sticks reaching into the DNA and the zinc ion as a grey sphere.
    04In-silico mutation ~12 min

    Mutate one residue and see what breaks: p53 R273H

    Find what the cancer hotspot Arg273 of p53 touches on DNA, mutate it to histidine, find the interactions again, and relax the mutant with an energy minimisation.

    Start lesson
  5. Figure from the lesson Dock a cancer drug and check it against the experiment: imatinib in ABL kinase
    05Molecular docking ~15 min

    Dock a cancer drug and check it against the experiment: imatinib in ABL kinase

    Redock the leukaemia drug imatinib into ABL kinase with AutoDock Vina in RBAi, then check the prediction against the crystal structure. In our run the top pose landed 0.85 Å from the experiment.

    Start lesson
  6. Figure from the lesson Proteins move: superposing two states of adenylate kinase
    06Superposition & RMSD ~12 min

    Proteins move: superposing two states of adenylate kinase

    Superpose the open and closed structures of adenylate kinase in RBAi, watch two domains swing shut over an inhibitor, and learn why an RMSD only means something once you say which atoms you aligned.

    Start lesson

The Journal

Briefings and working methods

What RBAi can do, how to choose between our tools, and how we check the evidence behind them. New articles land here alongside the lessons.

All Journal articles

  1. Product Briefings

    RBAi, Scholar, or MCP Cloud: choose by the work you need to do

    A task-first guide to RBAi’s public beta workspace, Scholar’s semantic and keyword literature discovery, and MCP Cloud’s biological-data tools for developers.

    Read

How the Academy works

Learn by making, not memorising

Ask in plain language

No PyMOL commands, no installs. You describe the structure and the figure you want; RBAi fetches the data and renders it.

Inspect what comes back

Every lesson teaches you to check the result against the real structure — and to ask for the specific fix when it isn't right yet.

Keep the evidence close

Real PDB structures, real sources, and honest limits on every figure. You learn what a picture can show — and what it can't.

Ready to open your first structure?

Start with Lesson 1, or jump straight into RBAi and bring a structure of your own.

Start Lesson 1 Open RBAi