Crystallography Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Crystallography, including details on x-ray crystals, techniques, analyses, structures.

Crystallographic protein model-building on the web.

Gopal K, McKee E, Romo T, Pai R, Smith J, Sacchettini J, Ioerger T

Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, 301 H.R. Bright Building, College Station, TX 77843-3112, USA. textal@tamu.edu

X-ray crystallography is the most widely used method to determine the 3D structure of protein molecules. One of the most difficult steps in protein crystallography is model-building, which consists of constructing a backbone and then amino acid side chains into an electron density map. Interpretation of electron density maps represents a major bottleneck in protein structure determination pipelines, and thus, automated techniques to interpret maps can greatly improve the throughput. We have developed WebTex, a simple and yet powerful web interface to TEXTAL, a program that automates this process of fitting atoms into electron density maps. TEXTAL can also be downloaded for local installation. Availability: Web interface, downloadable binaries and documentation at http://textal.tamu.edu

Published 5 February 2007 in Bioinformatics, 23(3): 375-7.
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