MOTIVATION: A wide variety of methods for the construction of an atomic model for a given amino acid sequence are known, the more accurate being those that use experimentally determined structures as templates. However, far fewer methods are aimed at refining these models. The approach presented here carefully blends models created by several different means, in an attempt to combine the good quality regions from each into a final, more refined, model. RESULTS: We describe here a number of refinement operators (collectively, 'move-set') that enable a relatively large region of conformational space to be searched. This is used within a genetic algorithm that reshuffles and repacks structural components. The utility of the move-set is demonstrated by introducing a cost function, containing both physical and other components guiding the input structures towards the target structure. We show that our move-set has the potential to improve the conformation of models and that this improvement can be beyond even the best template for some comparative modelling targets. AVAILABILITY: The populus software package and the source code are available at http://bmm.cancerresearchuk.org/~offman01/populus.html.

BACKGROUND: Alternative splicing is an efficient mechanism for increasing the variety of functions fulfilled by proteins in a living cell. It has been previously demonstrated that alternatively spliced regions often comprise functionally important and conserved sequence motifs. The objective of this work was to test the hypothesis that alternative splicing is correlated with contact regions of protein-protein interactions. RESULTS: Protein sequence spans involved in contacts with an interaction partner were delineated from atomic structures of transient interaction complexes and juxtaposed with the location of alternatively spliced regions detected by comparative genome analysis and spliced alignment. The total of 42 alternatively spliced isoforms were identified in 21 amino acid chains involved in biomolecular interactions. Using this limited dataset and a variety of sophisticated counting procedures we were not able to establish a statistically significant correlation between the positions of protein interaction sites and alternatively spliced regions. CONCLUSIONS: This finding contradicts a naïve hypothesis that alternatively spliced regions would correlate with points of contact. One possible explanation for that could be that all alternative splicing events change the spatial structure of the interacting domain to a sufficient degree to preclude interaction. This is indirectly supported by the observed lack of difference in the behaviour of relatively short regions affected by alternative splicing and cases when large portions of proteins are removed. More structural data on complexes of interacting proteins, including structures of alternative isoforms, are needed to test this conjecture.