SABBAC:: online structural alphabet-based protein backbone reconstruction from alpha-carbon trace

SABBAC is an on-line service devoted to protein backbone reconstruction from alpha-carbon trace. It is based on the assembly of fragments taken from a library of reduced size, selected from the encoding of the protein trace in a hidden Markov model-derived structural alphabet. The assembly of the fragments is achieved by a greedy algorithm, using an energy-based scoring. Alpha-carbon coordinates remain unaffected. SABBAC simply positions the missing backbone atoms, no further refinement is performed. From our tests, SABBAC performs equal or better than other similar on-line approach and is robust to deviations on the alpha-carbon coordinates. It can be accessed at http://bioserv.rpbs.jussieu.fr/SABBAC.html.