Nucleic acid polymerases are essential enzymes that replicate the genomes of both RNA and DNA viruses. These enzymes are generally encoded by viruses themselves so as to provide biochemical functions and control elements that differ from those of the host cell polymerases. The core active site structure used by all replicative polymerases is highly conserved and composed of two key aspartate residues from the conserved motifs A and C, but beyond this there is significant divergence among structures. These differences can make it difficult to select which portions of structures to align for comparisons, yet there are extended structural homologies within different groups of viral polymerases that should clearly be considered to generate optimal alignments.

This Zenodo Community was initially created to distribute a comprehensive structure-based superposition of every viral polymerase structure solve thus far as tool to facilitate direct structure comparisons. The result is a set of 646 structures that have effectively been aligned into a single common orientation. This was done using a similarity-tree approach wherein aligned regions grow in complexity as homologies among polymerases increases, as described in Peersen, 2019.

This Community site also provides a platform for further expansion of the project from other users. This may be expansions into non-viral polymerases, detailed bioinformatics analysis to further assess common structural features, or other related resources.