Pick a well-known protein and see its amino acids colored by chemical property.
Proteins are long chains of amino acids folded into intricate shapes, and biologists routinely color them by chemical property to reveal how a structure holds together. Hydrophobic residues hide in the water-shy core; charged ones sit on the surface; special cases form bridges and kinks. This tool takes a real protein structure and breaks it into those property groups, giving each a precise named color — no biology background required.
Choose a famous molecule from the list — the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin in your blood, the insulin that controls blood sugar, the lysozyme in your tears that fights bacteria, or the green fluorescent protein that revolutionised microscopy. The tool downloads its real structure from the RCSB Protein Data Bank, counts the amino acids, and groups them into five chemical classes, each shown with its count and an exact named PIGMENTUM color.
Hydrophobic (water-avoiding), polar (water-friendly), positively charged, negatively charged, and special (glycine, proline, cysteine). This is the standard teaching scheme used across structural biology. Advanced users can still enter any four-character PDB identifier directly. Very large structures may take a moment to load.
Curious non-specialists, biology and chemistry students, and educators who want a friendly, colorful way into protein structure.
Each protein is a chain of amino acids. We group them by chemical property and give each group a named color. Advanced: enter a PDB ID →