NanoShaper-VMD interface: computing and visualizing surfaces, pockets and channels in molecular systems.

Abstract

NanoShaper is a program specifically aiming the construction and analysis of the molecular surface of nanoscopic systems. It uses ray-casting for parallelism and it performs analytical computations whenever possible to maximize robustness and accuracy of the approach. Among the other features, NanoShaper provides volume, surface area, including that of internal cavities, for any considered molecular system. It identifies pockets via a very intuitive definition based on the concept of probe radius, intrinsic to the definition of the solvent excluded surface. We show here that, with a suitable choice of the parameters, the same approach can also permit the visualisation of molecular channels. NanoShaper has now been interfaced with the widely used molecular visualization software VMD, further enriching its already well furnished toolset. VMD is available at http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/. NanoShaper, its documentation, tutorials and supporting programs are available at http://concept.iit.it/downloads. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.