SWISS-MODEL AND THE SWISS-PDBVIEWER - AN ENVIRONMENT FOR COMPARATIVE PROTEIN MODELING

Comparative protein modeling is increasingly gaining interest since it is of great assistance during the rational design of mutagenesis expe riments. The availability of this method, and the resulting models, ha s however been restricted by the availability of expensive computer ha rdware and software. To overcome these limitations, we have developed an environment for comparative protein modeling that consists of SWISS -MODEL, a server for automated comparative protein modeling and of the SWISS-PdbViewer, a sequence to structure workbench. The Swiss-PdbView er not only acts as a client for SWISS-MODEL, but also provides a larg e selection of structure analysis and display tools. In addition, we p rovide the SWISS-MODEL Repository, a database containing more than 350 0 automatically generated protein models. By making such tools freely available to the scientific community, we hope to increase the use of protein structures and models in the process of experiment design.