BALCONY: an R package for MSA and functional compartments of protein variability analysis

BACKGROUND: Here, we present an R package for entropy/variability analysis that facilitates prompt and convenient data extraction, manipulation and visualization of protein features from multiple sequence alignments. BALCONY can work with residues dispersed across a protein sequence and map them on the corresponding alignment of homologous protein sequences. Additionally, it provides several entropy and variability scores that indicate the conservation of each residue. RESULTS: Our package allows the user to visualize evolutionary variability by locating the positions most likely to vary and to assess mutation candidates in protein engineering. CONCLUSION: In comparison to other R packages BALCONY allows conservation/variability analysis in context of protein structure with linkage of the appropriate metrics with physicochemical features of user choice. Availability: CRAN project page: https://cran.r-project.org/package=BALCONY and our website: http://www.tunnelinggroup.pl/software/ for major platforms: Linux/Unix, Windows and Mac OS X. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-018-2294-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.