MotivationStudying the transport paths of ligands, solvents, or ions in transmembrane proteins and proteins with buried binding sites is fundamental to the understanding of their biological function. A detailed analysis of the structural features influencing the transport paths is also important for engineering proteins for biomedical and biotechnological applications.ResultsCAVER Analyst 2.0 is a software tool for quantitative analysis and real-time visualization of tunnels and channels in static and dynamic structures. This version provides the users with many new functions, including advanced techniques for intuitive visual inspection of the spatiotemporal behavior of tunnels and channels. Novel integrated algorithms allow an efficient analysis and data reduction in large protein structures and molecular dynamic simulations.Availability and implementationCAVER Analyst 2.0 is a multi-platform standalone Java-based application. Binaries and documentation are freely available at www.caver.cz.Supplementary information
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
CAVER Analyst is a multi-platform software written in JAVA. Binaries and documentation are freely available for non-commercial use at http://www.caver.cz.
The Connolly surface defines the boundary between a molecular structure and its environment. Its shape depends on the radius of the probe used to inspect the structure. The exploration of surface features is of great interest among chemists because it helps them to better understand and describe processes in the molecular structure. To help chemists better explore these features, we have combined two things together: a fast extraction of Connolly surfaces from a Voronoi diagram of atoms and a fast visualization based on GPU ray casting. Not only the surface but also the volume description is provided by the diagram. This enables to distinguish surface cavities one from another and compute their properties, e.g. the approximate volume, the maximal filling sphere or the maximal probe that can escape from the cavity to the outer environment. Cavities can be filtered out by applying restrictions to these properties. Views behind the surface and surface clipping improve the perception of the complex internal structure. The surface is quickly recomputed for any probe radius, so interactive changes of the probe radius show the development of cavities, especially how and where they merge together or with the outer environment.The contour-buildup algorithm was parallelized for both CPU [LBPH10] and GPU [KGE11]. The CPU variant runs in
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.