PyXlinkViewer: A flexible tool for visualization of protein chemical crosslinking data within the PyMOL molecular
Bob Schiffrin1, Sheena E Radford1, David J Brockwell1
1Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK.
Abstract:
Chemical crosslinking-mass spectrometry (XL-MS) is a valuable technique for gaining insights into protein structure and the organization of macromolecular complexes. XL-MS data yield inter-residue restraints that can be compared with high-resolution structural data. Distances greater than the crosslinker spacer-arm can reveal lowly populated "excited" states of proteins/protein assemblies, or crosslinks can be used as restraints to generate structural models in the absence of structural data. Despite increasing uptake of XL-MS, there are few tools to enable rapid and facile mapping of XL-MS data onto high-resolution structures or structural models. PyXlinkViewer is a user-friendly plugin for PyMOL v2 that maps intra-protein, inter-protein, and dead-end crosslinks onto protein structures/models and automates the calculation of inter-residue distances for the detected crosslinks. This enables rapid visualization of XL-MS data, assessment of whether a set of detected crosslinks is congruent with structural data, and easy production of high-quality images for publication.
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