Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access first published online on May 30, 2007
This version published online on June 6, 2007
Nucleic Acids Research, doi:10.1093/nar/gkm367
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FRalanyzer: a tool for functional analysis of fold-recognition sequencestructure alignments
Computer Science and Engineering Department, 201 Bell Hall University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: 716 645 3180 (Ext. 163); Fax: 716 645 3464; Email: hksaini{at}cse.buffalo.edu
Received January 4, 2007. Revised April 26, 2007. Accepted April 26, 2007.
We describe FRalanyzer (Fold Recognition alignment analyzer), a new web tool to visually inspect sequencestructure alignments in order to predict functionally important residues in a query sequence of unknown function. This tool is aimed at helping to infer functional relationships between a query sequence and a template structure, and is particularly useful in analyzing fold recognition (FR) results. Because similar folds do not necessarily share the same function, it is not always straightforward to infer a function from an FR result alone. Manual inspection of the FR sequence-structure alignment is often required in order to search for conservation of functionally important residues. FRalanyzer automates parts of this time-consuming process. FRalanyzer takes as input a sequencestructure alignment, automatically searches annotated databases, displays functionally significant residues and highlights the functionally important positions that are identical in the alignment. FRalanyzer can also be used with sequence-structure alignments obtained by other methods, and with structurestructure alignments obtained from structural comparison of newly determined 3D-structures of unknown function. Fralanyzer is available at http://fralanyzer.cse.buffalo.edu/.