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. 2019 Jul 2;47(W1):W632-W635.
doi: 10.1093/nar/gkz407.

VOLPES: an interactive web-based tool for visualizing and comparing physicochemical properties of biological sequences

Lukas Bartonek  1 , Bojan Zagrovic  1
Affiliations

VOLPES: an interactive web-based tool for visualizing and comparing physicochemical properties of biological sequences

Lukas Bartonek et al. Nucleic Acids Res. .

Abstract

The structure, dynamics and, ultimately, biological function of proteins and nucleic acids are determined by the physicochemical properties of their primary sequences. Such properties are frequently captured via one-dimensional profile plots depicting a given physicochemical variable as a function of sequence position. Hydrophobicity, charge or structural disorder in proteins or nucleobase-density in nucleic acids are routinely visualized in this manner to analyze sequences at a glance. Such visualizations, however, are typically created case-by-case in a purely static manner, employ fixed visualization parameters only and do not enable a quantitative comparison between different sequences. Here, we present VOLPES (volpes.univie.ac.at), a user-friendly web server and the corresponding JavaScript library that enable a fully interactive, multifunctional visualization, analysis and comparison of the physicochemical properties of protein and nucleic-acid sequences, allowing unprecedented insight into biological sequence data and creating a starting point for further in-depth exploration.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Example of a typical analysis performed via the VOLPES server: charge profiles calculated at different values of pH for a specified protein. A quantitative analysis of the similarity between profiles is given in the correlation matrix.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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