PHYSICO: An UNIX based Standalone Procedure for Computation of Individual and Group Properties of Protein Sequences

In the genomic and proteomic era, efficient and automated analyses of sequence properties of protein have become an important task in bioinformatics. There are general public licensed (GPL) software tools to perform a part of the job. However, computations of mean properties of large number of orthologous sequences are not possible from the above mentioned GPL sets. Further, there is no GPL software or server which can calculate window dependent sequence properties for a large number of sequences in a single run. With a view to overcome above limitations, we have developed a standalone procedure i.e. PHYSICO, which performs various stages of computation in a single run based on the type of input provided either in RAW-FASTA or BLOCK-FASTA format and makes excel output for: a) Composition, Class composition, Mean molecular weight, Isoelectic point, Aliphatic index and GRAVY, b) column based compositions, variability and difference matrix, c) 25 kinds of window dependent sequence properties. The program is fast, efficient, error free and user friendly. Calculation of mean and standard deviation of homologous sequences sets, for comparison purpose when relevant, is another attribute of the program; a property seldom seen in existing GPL softwares. AVAILABILITY: PHYSICO is freely available for non-commercial/academic user in formal request to the corresponding author akbanerjee@biotech.buruniv.ac.in