Integrated tools for structural and sequence alignment and analysis.

We have developed new computational methods for displaying and analyzing members of protein superfamilies. These methods (MinRMS, AlignPlot and MSFviewer) integrate sequence and structural information and are implemented as separate but cooperating programs to our Chimera molecular modeling system. Integration of multiple sequence alignment information and three-dimensional structural representations enable researchers to generate hypotheses about the sequence-structure relationship. Structural superpositions can be generated and easily tuned to identify similarities around important characteristics such as active sites or ligand binding sites. Information related to the release of Chimera, MinRMS, AlignPlot and MSFviewer can be obtained at http:¿www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera.