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Section: New Results

Development of a symmetry detection software AnAnaS

Participants : Guillaume Pagès, Sergei Grudinin.

Macromolecules are generally not rigid bodies at physiological temperature and they adopt different conformational states. Thus, if one considers a macromolecular assembly made of $N$ subunits, do we expect that all the units will be structurally identical to each other? Most probably not, since at any given moment of time, each unit may be sampling a different conformational state. For example, there are plenty of X-ray structures of homo-dimers, where the individual monomers are not structurally identical.

In order to quantitatively assess these differences, we developed a method for Analytical Analysis of Symmetries (AnAnaS) in protein complexes. The method is extremely fast, robust and accurate. Two manuscripts describing the method are currently submitted for publication. This method is available on the website of the team (https://team.inria.fr/nano-d/software/ananas/).