Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on October 6, 2007
Bioinformatics 2007 23(22):3093-3094; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm489
BiasViz: visualization of amino acid biased regions in protein alignments
1Molecular Medicine, Ottawa Health Research Institute, 501 Smyth Road, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1H 8L6, 2Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, John Innes Centre, Norwich UK and 3Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Canada
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
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Summary: About a third of all protein sequences have at least one composition biased region (CBR). Such regions might act as linkers between protein domains but often confer specific binding to various molecules; therefore, their characterization in terms of their boundaries and over-represented residues is important. Analysis of CBRs in a particular sequence can be time consuming if several types of biases have to be explored and their position visualized. Assessment of the significance of the detected CBRs can be approached by comparison to homologous protein sequences. To assist this procedure, we have developed BiasViz, a tool that allows to graphically studying local amino acid composition in protein sequences of a multiple sequence alignment.
Availability: BiasViz java applet and source code can be accessed from http://biasviz.sourceforge.net
Contact: matthuska{at}alumni.uwaterloo.ca
Associate Editor: Limsoon Wong
Received on July 25, 2007; revised on July 25, 2007; accepted on September 14, 2007