Modeling of protein side-chain conformations with RASP

Modeling of side-chain conformations on a fixed protein backbone, also called side-chain packing, plays an important role in protein structure prediction, protein design, molecular docking, and functional analysis. RASP, or RApid Side-chain Predictor, is a recently developed program that can model protein side-chain conformations with both high accuracy and high speed. Moreover, it can generate structures with few atomic clashes. This chapter first provides a brief introduction to the principle and performances of the RASP package. Then details on how to use RASP programs to predict protein side-chain conformations are elaborated. Finally, it describes case studies for structure refinement in homology modeling and residue substitution.