QA-RecombineIt: a server for quality assessment and recombination of protein models

Abstract

QA-RecombineIt provides a web interface to assess the quality of protein 3D structure models and to improve the accuracy of models by merging fragments of multiple input models. QA-RecombineIt has been developed for protein modelers who are working on difficult problems, have a set of different homology models and/or de novo models (from methods such as I-TASSER or ROSETTA) and would like to obtain one consensus model that incorporates the best parts into one structure that is internally coherent. An advanced mode is also available, in which one can modify the operation of the fragment recombination algorithm by manually identifying individual fragments or entire models to recombine. Our method produces up to 100 models that are expected to be on the average more accurate than the starting models. Therefore, our server may be useful for crystallographic protein structure determination, where protein models are used for Molecular Replacement to solve the phase problem. To address the latter possibility, a special feature was added to the QA-RecombineIt server. The QA-RecombineIt server can be freely accessed at http://iimcb.genesilico.pl/qarecombineit/.