Talk:Structural alignment

This entry is not only bad, but probably full of mistakes. Plese feel free to voice your opinion, create new topics where appropriate and generally change at will the contents of this page.

The correct refence to cite SARF2: Alexandrov, N.N. SARFing the PDB. Protein Engineering (1996), 9:727-732. There is a mistake in the authorship of SARF2 program.

You aren't wrong about it being full of mistakes!

Some approaches use quaternerions to reduce the dimensionality of the space -- Actually, quaternions increase the dimensionality of rotation space.
The Dali algorithm (named after Salvador Dali) uses network isomorphism between the contact networks of two proteins to perform alignment. -- DALI is an abbreviation of Distance matrix Alignment.

Stewart Adcock 23:21, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think you should be brave and fix this page!

Don't worry, I definitely will -- when I have time. I even have a report that I could wikify. Stewart Adcock 17:15, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Cool! --Dan 15:34, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Did a complete rework, hope it is a bit clearer... One could expand on the algorithmic side of things, as well as on the use of the method. Will try, as soon as I find time. Dr. Strangelove 20:00, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

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The following comments made by me, Andrew Dalke <dalke@dalkescientific.com> on the Biopython mailing list. I don't like learning a bajillion wiki formatting conventions so I'm leaving this as-is on the talk page.

If it's two conformations of the same structure and the goal is to minimize overall RMSD through a single global alignment matrix then the usual reference I know is Kabsch

 [Kabsch, 1976] Kabsch, W. (1976). A solution for the best rotation to relate two sets of vectors. Acta. Crystal, 32A:922-923.
 [Kabsch, 1978] Kabsch, W. (1978). A discussion of the solution for the best rotation to related two sets of vectors. Acta. Crystal, 34A:827-828.

(The first had an ambiguity that could cause a sign error; fixed in the second.)

Several structure program implement that including:

 O - http://xray.bmc.uu.se/usf/factory_4.html
 VMD - http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/vmd-1.7.1/ug/node183.html
 PyMol - http://www.pymolwiki.org/index.php/Kabsch

This algorithm is not mentioned on the Wiki page and is 11 years older than the oldest mentioned reference. It isn't NP-hard as alluded to in the Wiki, since it's solving a much simpler problem.

The date for ProFit is strange on the Wiki. I knew about ProFit before the claimed 1996. The web site says http://www.bioinf.org.uk/software/profit/faq.html

No paper has been published describing ProFit itself since it is simply a convenient program (I hope) to let you use a standard fitting algorithm consequently, it is a little difficult to reference. The exact wording is up to you and dependent on the context, but I suggest something similar to:
Fitting was performed using the McLachlan algorithm (McLachlan, A.D., 1982 ``Rapid Comparison of Protein Structres, Acta Cryst A38, 871-873) as implemented in the program ProFit (Martin, A.C.R., http://www.bioinf.org.uk/software/profit/).

The McLachlan algorithm is also not mentioned in the Wiki.

I found a usenet announcement about ProFit at http://groups.google.com/group/bionet.software/msg/f219c5163bbadbdc?dmode=source&hl=en

 From: mar...@bsm.bioc.ucl.ac.uk (Andrew Martin)
 Subject: ANNOUNCE: Protein Fitting Software
 Date: 1995/07/20
 Message-ID: <1995Jul20.101545.37119@ucl.ac.uk>#1/1
 X-Deja-AN: 106640715
 organization: University College London
 newsgroups: bionet.software

 I've finally (after about 2 years) got around to fixing the last (?)
 remaining bugs in my ProFit protein least-squares fitting software and
 decided to make it generally available.

so the date should be 1995 or 1993 or earlier. I suspect the 1996 date came from the "first written" date for the documentation, at http://www.bioinf.org.uk/software/profit/doc/

what happened to the image? Str-alignment.png

according to the log the link was removed because the image was deleted from wikimedia

any way to link it back?