Affiliations: ARC Centre in Bioinformatics, University of
Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia | Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of
Queensland St Lucia, Queensland, Australia | Advanced Computational Modelling Centre, Department of
Mathematics, University of Queensland St Lucia, Queensland, Australia
Abstract: Visualization of functional and structural features of biological
macromolecules is an important aspect of communicating and analyzing biological
data, for example the presence of a transmembrane domain in relation to a
nucleotide binding site or the organization of transcription factor binding
sites in a promoter. However, this is not necessarily a trivial task especially
when the feature information is complex or lengthy. While there are some tools
available that can create these images, none have been implemented for the
specific purpose of automating the generation of presentation-quality graphics
for displaying feature information. We have implemented DomainDraw, a
visualization tool that can be used to generate schematic diagrams of
biological macromolecules for the purpose of representing the relative position
and range of user-specified domains or motifs. The user specifies the name,
position, and range of the domains of interest and DomainDraw generates the
image based on these parameters. Optional parameters include domain color and
shape, image size, and whether to align multiple proteins using a particular
domain. DomainDraw is publicly available as a web server and can be accessed at
http://domaindraw.imb.uq.edu.au. The executable may be obtained by contacting
the authors.
