Visualizing Protein Structural Superpositions and Alignments with StructAlignViewer

Abstract

With emerging amounts of genomic data, research in the field of computational molecular biology is calling for new tools for displaying macromolecular structures. In this short article, we describe StructAlignViewer - a software package for visualizing protein structures and spatial super positions. StructAlignViewer can be used in a standalone mode or in conjunction with an in-house software for optimal pairwise protein structure alignment. The program can display a single protein or a superposition of two proteins. The distinguishing feature of StructAlignViewer is its ability to visualize, in real time, the pairwise structural super positions and alignments generated by the protein structure alignment algorithm MaxPairs.