SAMBA - AN INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE FOR OPTIMIZING THE DESIGN OF BIOLOGICAL MACROMOLECULES CRYSTALLIZATION EXPERIMENTS

SAmBA is a new software for the design of minimal experimental protoco ls using the notion of orthogonal arrays of strength 2. The main appli cation of SAmBA is the search of protein crystallization conditions. G iven a user input defining the relevant effectors/variables (e.g., pH, temperature, salts) and states (e.g., pH: 5, 6, 7 and 8), this softwa re proposes an optimal set of experiments in which all tested variable s and the pairwise interactions between them are symmetrically sampled . No a priori restrictions on the number and range of experimental var iables is imposed. SAmBA consists of two complementary programs, SAm a nd BA, using a simulated annealing approach and a backtracking algorit hm, respectively. The software is freely available as C code or as an interactive JAVA applet at http://igs-server.cnrs-mrs.fr. (C) 1997 Wil ey-Liss, Inc.