SUMMARY: Secondary structures provide a deep insight into the protein architecture. They can serve for comparison between individual protein family members. The most straightforward way how to deal with protein secondary structure is its visualization using 2D diagrams. Several software tools for the generation of 2D diagrams were developed. Unfortunately, they create 2D diagrams based on only a single protein. Therefore, 2D diagrams of two proteins from one family markedly differ. For this reason, we developed the 2DProts database, which contains secondary structure 2D diagrams for all domains from the CATH and all proteins from PDB databases. These 2D diagrams are generated based on a whole protein family, and they also consider information about the 3D arrangement of secondary structure elements. Moreover, 2DProts database contains multiple 2D diagrams, which provide an overview of a whole protein family's secondary structures. 2DProts is updated weekly and is integrated into CATH. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Freely accessible at https://2dprots.ncbr.muni.cz. The web interface was implemented in JavaScript. The database was implemented in Python. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Current collaborative tools are often not able to profit from existing systems for user management. It is therefore necessary for collaborative systems to administrate their users using their own solutions, which may not be adequate in terms of scalability or security. Many users may also experience problems working with authentication credentials (e.g. digital certificates) employed by collaborative systems. In this paper, we propose a general framework to provide easy-to-use yet secure access to collaborative systems, which offers a general middleware layer to accommodate various types of collaborative tools. The framework utilizes the emerging model of federations, which allows to provide a user-friendly means of logging in to a collaborative system as well as a solid basis for specifying access control policies. The framework handles all security aspects in a transparent way without requiring the users to perform complicated tasks. Using user attributes maintained in the federation, it is also possible to implement efficient and dynamic group management of the collaborating users.

Videoconferencing has emerged as a popular method of remote communication. The design of a videoconferencing environment strongly influences the communication efficiency and user satisfaction. Various studies on perceived effects of videoconferencing environments and their parameters have been done, however, they primarily focused on dyadic conversation. This paper describes an exploratory study on the effects on remote groups communication. Beginning with the standard environment, a videoconferencing design has been developed iteratively according to information obtained from the experimental group. Two new videoconferencing environment designs are introduced to suit the group conversation needs better and bring the group videoconference closer to face-to-face communication.