The early beta of peptide analytical tool goes live
By Sergey Nosov
Amino acids are important building blocks of living organisms. Peptides are chains of amino acids; many hormones, antigens, toxins and other biologically active molecules are peptides. Long chains of amino-acids are what proteins made of.
Scientists developing cures for Diabetes, Ebola, Alzheimer’s, Malaria, Cancer, Graves’, Lyme, Osteoporosis, HIV, Parkinson’s, and countless other devastating diseases study peptides and fragments of proteins. At peptidenexus.com today we are excited to announce the early beta of a new analytical tool that speeds up the work with peptides and protein fragments.
Here is what makes the new tool different, a peptide calculator like no other:
- The tool understands post-translational and other side-chain modifications simply by reading them from peptide and protein fragment sequences. There is no complicated user interface to learn, just a text box for the sequence and a “calculate” button.
- Allows arbitrary mixing of one-letter and three-letter amino-acid codes, for more compact and easier to read notation and for quick insertion of three-letter-only amino acids into one-letter coded sequences.
- Easy isotopic labeling of all or a specific count of any atoms or combination of atoms in any amino-acid in any peptide or protein fragment, right in the sequence.
Your feedback
The goal of making the pre-production tool available on peptidenexus.com is to get the tool into the hands of researchers and scientists who need such means to speed up their work as soon as possible, to gather real-life feedback on the directions the work on the tool should take.
To get familiar with what are the capabilities built into the tool so far, please view the following demonstration video.
We value your feedback, please share your ideas on what we should do to make the peptide and protein fragment analytical tool better.
The risks and challenges that remain are inherent to the tasks this project solves. The tool code is unit-checked against over ten thousand of actual peptides and protein fragments used in scientific research; the development team’s goal is to maximize the number of matches between the computer models created by the tool and how the original researchers envisioned the structures when writing the sequences.
What can scientists use this tool for?
From the get-go the tool calculates average molecular weight. With peptide or protein fragment model in the computer, many other calculations can be performed. The plan is to add monoisotopic weight calculation and display of mass to charge ionization tables for MS analysis.
Let us know what is useful for your work.