Bioinformatics Vol. 19 no. 7 2003
Pages 882-888
© 2003 Oxford University Press
Towards optimal views of proteins
Stockholm Bioinformatics Center, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
Received on August 15, 2002
; revised on October 23, 2002 and December 17, 2002
; accepted on December 19, 2002
Motivation: Graphical representations of proteins in online databases generally give default views orthogonal to the PDB file coordinate system. These views are often uninformative in terms of protein structure and/or function. Here we discuss the development of a simple automatic algorithm to provide a good view of a protein domain with respect to its structural features.
Results: We used dimension reduction with the preservation of topology (using Kohonens self organising map) to map 3D carbon alpha coordinates into 2D. The original protein structure was then rotated to the view which corresponded most closely to the 2D mapping. This procedure, which we call OVOP, was evaluated in a public blind trial on the web against random views and a flattest view. The OVOP views were consistently rated better than the other views by our volunteers.
Availability: The source code is available from the OVOP homepage: http://www.sbc.su.se/~oscar/ovop
Contact: maccallr{at}sbc.su.se