MUSTANG

MUSTANG performs multiple protein structure alignment using spatial coordinates of C(alpha) atoms to produce multiple sequence alignments and structural superpositions for structural genomics and protein family analysis.

Key Features:

• Algorithmic Foundation: Employs a progressive pairwise heuristic augmented by refinement phases to improve alignment accuracy.
• Spatial Data Utilization: Utilizes spatial information from C(alpha) atoms to guide residue correspondences and structural superposition.
• Output Generation: Produces both multiple sequence alignments and the corresponding superposition of structures.
• Performance Evaluation: Benchmarked against hand-curated alignments from literature and 1033 alignment families in the HOMSTRAD database; comparable to DALI for pairwise alignments and outperforms POSA, CE-MC, MALECON, and MultiProt for multiple structural alignments.

Scientific Applications:

• Structural Genomics: Supports structural genomics by aligning multiple protein structures to reveal relationships among proteins.
• Protein Family Analysis: Facilitates analysis of closely related and distantly related proteins, including proteins exhibiting conformational changes.

Methodology:

Constructs multiple alignments using spatial coordinates of C(alpha) atoms via a progressive pairwise heuristic followed by refinement phases.