Visualisation and integration of G protein-coupled receptor related information help the modelling: Description and applications of the Viseur program

G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) constitute a superfamily of receptors t hat forms an important therapeutic target. The number of known GPCR sequenc es and related information increases rapidly. For these reasons, we are dev eloping the Viseur program to integrate the available information related t o GPCRs. The Viseur program allows one to interactively visualise and/or mo dify the sequences, transmembrane areas, alignments, models and results of mutagenesis experiments in an integrated environment. This integration incr eases the ease of modelling GPCRs: visualisation and manipulation improveme nts enable easier databank interrogation and interpretation. Unique program features include: (i) automatic construction of 'Snake-like' diagrams or h yperlinked GPCR molecular models to HTML or VRML and (ii) automatic access to a mutagenesis data server through the Internet. The novel algorithms or methods involved are presented, followed by the overall complementary featu res of the program. Finally, we present two applications of the program: (i ) an automatic construction of GPCR snake-like diagrams for the GPCRDB WWW server, and (ii) a preparation of the modelling of the 5HT receptor subtype s. The interest of the direct access to mutagenesis results through an alig nment and a molecular model are discussed. The Viseur program, which runs o n SGI workstations, is freely available and can be used for preparing the m odelling of integral membrane proteins or as an alignment editor tool.