Machines Made Of Proteins Screensaver
The Machines Made Of Proteins screensaver shows curated macromolecular complexes from EMBL-EBI's Complex Portal, key-less. A complex is what proteins actually are in practice: not lone molecules but assemblies with a fixed membership and a job. Every entry was curated by hand from the experimental literature rather than inferred, which is why there are twenty thousand and not two million. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
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How the Machines Made Of Proteins screensaver works
The saver reads the source described above and draws it on a canvas — no account, no tracking.
Curated macromolecular complexes from EMBL-EBI's Complex Portal, key-less. A complex is what proteins actually are in practice: not lone molecules but assemblies with a fixed membership and a job. Every entry was curated by hand from the experimental literature rather than inferred, which is why there are twenty thousand and not two million.
It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.
Colours can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.
Inside the Complex Portal: proteins in teams
Inside a cell, most proteins do not work alone. They assemble into complexes, such as the ribosome that builds new proteins or the proteasome that breaks old ones down, and the complex as a whole carries out a job that no single member could. The Complex Portal, run by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) at Hinxton, UK, is a manually curated catalogue of macromolecular complexes with known function, built by the IntAct group.
Each entry describes the composition, topology and function of a single complex from a defined species. Subunits are identified by canonical UniProt identifiers, entries carry complex-specific Gene Ontology terms, and accessions take the form CPX- followed by digits. Because entries are species-specific, a similar complex can appear separately for humans, mice and yeast.
The portal is a curated resource, so it concentrates on well-characterised, stable complexes from a limited set of organisms rather than every predicted interaction. A complex missing from it is not evidence that it does not exist, only that it has not been curated. Entries link out to other resources such as UniProt, Gene Ontology and Reactome.
A worked example
Curated macromolecular complexes from EMBL-EBI's Complex Portal, key-less. A complex is what proteins actually are in practice: not lone molecules but assemblies with a fixed membership and a job. Every entry was curated by hand from the experimental literature rather than inferred, which is why there are twenty thousand and not two million.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display.
- Every value on screen comes from the live source — nothing is simulated.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from the source named on this page and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Is it free?
- Yes, and it runs entirely in your browser.
- What is a protein complex?
- It is a group of two or more macromolecules, usually proteins, that bind together and act as a single molecular machine. Some complexes also include RNA or small molecules.
- Does every species appear in the portal?
- No. Curation focuses on a limited number of model organisms and humans, so many species have no entries.
- Why curate by hand instead of using prediction software?
- Manual curation ties each entry to published experimental evidence. That is slower to build than a computational list, and the portal now keeps machine-learning predictions separate from its curated entries.