PBxplore: a tool to analyze local protein structure and deformability with protein Blocks

ABSTRACT Proteins are highly dynamic macromolecules. A classical way to analyze their inner flexibility is to perform molecular dynamics simulations. In this context, we present the advantage to use small structural prototypes, namely the Protein Blocks (PBs). PBs give a good approximation of the local structure of the protein backbone. More importantly, by reducing the conformational complexity of protein structures, they allow analyzes of local protein deformability which cannot be done with other methods and had been used efficiently in different applications. PBxplore is a suite of tools to analyze the dynamics and deformability of protein structures using PBs. It is able to process large amount of data such as those produced by molecular dynamics simulations. It produces various outputs with text and graphics, such as frequencies, entropy and information logo. PBxplore is available at https://github.com/pierrepo/PBxplore and is released under the open-source MIT license.