PyProtif: a PyMol plugin to retrieve and visualize protein motifs for structural studies

Proteins often possess several motifs and the ones with similar motifs were found to have similar biochemical properties and thus related biological functions. Thereby, multiple databases were developed to store information on such motifs in proteins. For instance, PDBsum stores the results of Promotif’s generated structural motifs and Pfam stores pre-computed patterns of functional domains. In addition to the fact that all this stored information is extremely useful, we can further augment its importance if we ought to integrate these motifs into visualization software. In this work, we have developed PyProtif, a plugin for the PyMOL molecular visualization program, which automatically retrieves protein structural and functional motifs from different databases and integrates them in PyMOL for visualization and analyses. Through an expendable menu and a user-friendly interface, the plugin grants the users the ability to study simultaneously multiple proteins and to select and manipulate each motif separately. Thus, this plugin will be of great interest for structural, evolutionary and classification studies of proteins.