ProtVista is an open-source protein feature visualisation tool used by UniProt, the high-quality, comprehensive, and freely accessible resource of protein sequence and functional information. It is built upon the suite of modular standard and reusable web components called Nightingale, a collaborative open-source library. It enables integration of protein sequence features, variants, and structural data in a unified viewer. These components are shared across resources, for example Nightingale components also power feature visualisations in InterPro or PDBe, and the turnkey ProtVista library is used by Open Targets or Pharos.

ProtVista is undergoing major technical upgrades, to expand its reach, cover broader use cases, and also be able to handle ever-growing quantities of data. We are transitioning from SVG graphics to Canvas/WebGL rendering to improve performance for large datasets and on low-spec devices. We are refactoring the tool’s core to allow custom data inputs via a configurable API, letting developers plug in their own protein annotation data sources. Additionally, a new track configuration UI will let end-users toggle and rearrange feature tracks for a more flexible, tailored view. This talk will introduce ProtVista’s open-source design based on standards and demonstrate how these upcoming enhancements make it easier and faster to build interactive protein feature visualisations.

Relevant links: - ProtVista codebase: https://github.com/ebi-webcomponents/protvista-uniprot - Nightingale codebase: https://github.com/ebi-webcomponents/nightingale - Publication “Nightingale: web components for protein feature visualization”, 2023 https://academic.oup.com/bioinformaticsadvances/article/3/1/vbad064/7178007 - Publication “ProtVista: visualization of protein sequence annotations”, 2017 https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/33/13/2040/3063132