PROMALS3D: Multiple Protein Sequence Alignment Enhanced with Evolutionary and Three-Dimensional Structural Information

Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is an essential tool with many applications in bioinformatics and computational biology. Accurate MSA construction for divergent proteins remains a difficult computational task. The constantly increasing protein sequences and structures in public databases could be used to improve alignment quality. PROMALS3D is a tool for protein MSA construction enhanced with additional evolutionary and structural information from database searches. PROMALS3D automatically identifies homologs from sequence and structure databases for input proteins, derives structure-based constraints from alignments of three-dimensional structures, and combines them with sequence-based constraints of profile–profile alignments in a consistency-based framework to construct high-quality multiple sequence alignments. PROMALS3D output is a consensus alignment enriched with sequence and structural information about input proteins and their homologs. PROMALS3D Web server and package are available at http://prodata.swmed.edu/PROMALS3D .