Bioinformatics, (2014) doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btu166 In the above article funding information was initially omitted. The following funding statement has been added to the article online: This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC-StG-2012-311318-ProtDyn2Function) The author apologises for this error.

UNLABELLED: Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a powerful tool for observing the motion of biomolecules at the atomic level. One technique, the analysis of relaxation dispersion phenomenon, is highly suited for studying the kinetics and thermodynamics of biological processes. Built on top of the relax computational environment for NMR dynamics is a new dispersion analysis designed to be comprehensive, accurate and easy-to-use. The software supports more models, both numeric and analytic, than current solutions. An automated protocol, available for scripting and driving the graphical user interface (GUI), is designed to simplify the analysis of dispersion data for NMR spectroscopists. Decreases in optimization time are granted by parallelization for running on computer clusters and by skipping an initial grid search by using parameters from one solution as the starting point for another -using analytic model results for the numeric models, taking advantage of model nesting, and using averaged non-clustered results for the clustered analysis. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The software relax is written in Python with C modules and is released under the GPLv3+ license. Source code and precompiled binaries for all major operating systems are available from http://www.nmr-relax.com. CONTACT: [email protected].

MOTIVATION: Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) represent a significant fraction of the human proteome. The classical structure function paradigm that has successfully underpinned our understanding of molecular biology breaks down when considering proteins that have no stable tertiary structure in their functional form. One convenient approach is to describe the protein in terms of an equilibrium of rapidly inter-converting conformers. Currently, tools to generate such ensemble descriptions are extremely rare, and poorly adapted to the prediction of experimental data. RESULTS: We present flexible-meccano-a highly efficient algorithm that generates ensembles of molecules, on the basis of amino acid-specific conformational potentials and volume exclusion. Conformational sampling depends uniquely on the primary sequence, with the possibility of introducing additional local or long-range conformational propensities at an amino acid-specific resolution. The algorithm can also be used to calculate expected values of experimental parameters measured at atomic or molecular resolution, such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and small angle scattering, respectively. We envisage that flexible-meccano will be useful for researchers who wish to compare experimental data with those expected from a fully disordered protein, researchers who see experimental evidence of deviation from 'random coil' behaviour in their protein, or researchers who are interested in working with a broad ensemble of conformers representing the flexibility of the IDP of interest. AVAILABILITY: A fully documented multi-platform executable is provided, with examples, at http://www.ibs.fr/science-213/scientific-output/software/flexible-meccano/ CONTACT: [email protected].

BACKGROUND: The stability of proteins is governed by the heat capacity, enthalpy and entropy changes of folding, which are strongly correlated to the change in solvent accessible surface area experienced by the polypeptide. While the surface exposed in the folded state can be easily determined, accessibilities for the unfolded state at the atomic level cannot be obtained experimentally and are typically estimated using simplistic models of the unfolded ensemble. A web application providing realistic accessibilities of the unfolded ensemble of a given protein at the atomic level will prove useful. RESULTS: ProtSA, a web application that calculates sequence-specific solvent accessibilities of the unfolded state ensembles of proteins has been developed and made freely available to the scientific community. The input is the amino acid sequence of the protein of interest. ProtSA follows a previously published calculation protocol which uses the Flexible-Meccano algorithm to generate unfolded conformations representative of the unfolded ensemble of the protein, and uses the exact analytical software ALPHASURF to calculate atom solvent accessibilities, which are averaged on the ensemble. CONCLUSION: ProtSA is a novel tool for the researcher investigating protein folding energetics. The sequence specific atom accessibilities provided by ProtSA will allow obtaining better estimates of the contribution of the hydrophobic effect to the free energy of folding, will help to refine existing parameterizations of protein folding energetics, and will be useful to understand the influence of point mutations on protein stability.