PyWATER: a PyMOL plug-in to find conserved water molecules in proteins by clustering

Bioinformatics. 2014 Oct 15;30(20):2978-80. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btu424. Epub 2014 Jul 1.

Abstract

Summary: Conserved water molecules play a crucial role in protein structure, stabilization of secondary structure, protein activity, flexibility and ligand binding. Clustering of water molecules in superimposed protein structures, obtained by X-ray crystallography at high resolution, is an established method to identify consensus water molecules in all known protein structures of the same family. PyWATER is an easy-to-use PyMOL plug-in and identifies conserved water molecules in the protein structure of interest. PyWATER can be installed via the user interface of PyMOL. No programming or command-line knowledge is required for its use.

Availability and implementation: PyWATER and a tutorial are available at https://github.com/hiteshpatel379/PyWATER. PyMOL is available at http://www.pymol.org/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/pymol/.

Contact: stefan.guenther@pharmazie.uni-freiburg.de.

MeSH terms

  • Cluster Analysis
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Computer Graphics
  • Crystallography, X-Ray
  • Models, Molecular
  • Protein Structure, Secondary
  • Proteins / chemistry*
  • Software*
  • User-Computer Interface
  • Water*

Substances

  • Proteins
  • Water