The structure and function of macromolecules depend critically on the ionization (protonation) states of their acidic and basic groups. A number of existing practical methods predict protonation equilibrium pK constants of macromolecules based upon their atomic resolution Protein Data Bank (PDB) structures; the calculations are often performed within the framework of the continuum electrostatics model. Unfortunately, these methodologies are complex, involve multiple steps and require considerable investment of effort. Our web server provides access to a tool that automates this process, allowing both experts and novices to quickly obtain estimates of pKs as well as other related characteristics of biomolecules such as isoelectric points, titration curves and energies of protonation microstates. Protons are added to the input structure according to the calculated ionization states of its titratable groups at the user-specified pH; the output is in the PQR (PDB + charges + radii) format. In addition, corresponding coordinate and topology files are generated in the format supported by the molecular modeling package AMBER. The server is intended for a broad community of biochemists, molecular modelers, structural biologists and drug designers; it can also be used as an educational tool in biochemistry courses.

Tandemly arrayed genes (TAGs) play an important functional and physiological role in the genome. Most previous studies have focused on individual TAG families in a few species, yet a broad characterization of TAGs is not available. Here we identified all TAGs in the genomes of humans, mouse, and rat and performed a comprehensive analysis of TAG distribution, TAG sizes, TAG orientations and intergenic distances, and TAG functions. TAGs account for about 14-17% of all genes in the genome and nearly one-third of all duplicated genes, highlighting the predominant role that tandem duplication plays in gene duplication. For all species, TAG distribution is highly heterogeneous along chromosomes and some chromosomes are enriched with TAG forests, whereas others are enriched with TAG deserts. The majority of TAGs are of size 2 for all genomes, similar to the previous findings in Caenorhabditis elegans, Arabidopsis thaliana, and Oryza sativa, suggesting that it is a rather general phenomenon in eukaryotes. The comparison with the genome patterns shows that TAG members have a significantly higher proportion of parallel gene orientation in all species, corroborating Graham's claim that parallel orientation is the preferred form of orientation in TAGs. Moreover, TAG members with parallel orientation tend to be closer to each other than all neighboring genes in the genome with parallel orientation. The analyses of Gene Ontology function indicate that genes with receptor or binding activities are significantly overrepresented by TAGs. Computer simulation reveals that random gene rearrangements have little effect on the statistics of TAGs for all genomes. Finally, the average proportion of TAGs shows a trend of increase with the increase of family sizes, although the correlation between TAG proportions in individual families and family sizes is not significant.

Tandemly arrayed genes (TAGs) account for about one third of the duplicated genes in eukaryotic genomes, yet there has not been any systematic study of their gene expression patterns. Taking advantage of recently published large-scale microarray data sets, we studied the expression divergence of 361 two-member TAGs in human and 212 two-member TAGs in mouse and examined the effect of sequence divergence, gene orientation, and chromosomal proximity on the divergence of TAG expression patterns. Our results show that there is a weak negative correlation between sequence divergence of TAG members and their expression similarity. There is also a weak negative correlation between chromosomal proximity of TAG members and their expression similarity. We did not detect any significant relationship between gene orientation and expression similarity. We also found that downstream TAG members do not show significantly narrower expression breadth than upstream members, contrary to what we predict based on TAG expression divergence hypothesis that we propose. Finally, we show that both chromosomal proximity and expression correlation in TAGs do not differ significantly from their neighboring non-TAG gene pairs, suggesting that tandem duplication is unlikely to be the cause for the higher-than-random expression association between neighboring genes on a chromosome in human and mouse.