Hi all,
I have a clustal aln file or a fasta file with two nearly identical aligned protein sequences. When I view them in the multialign viewer I would like to change the color of the consensus style. That is, residues which are both identical should be just black (rather than red and capitalized) and residues that are not identical should be red (or some other color that contrasts against black). Is there anyway to do this?
Better yet would it be possible to not use the consensus at all and color the entire non-matching column a color of my choice?
Thanks, Sabuj Pattanayek
Hi Sabuj, Currently there is no way to change the Consensus line contents from the user interface. All you can do is to turn it off entirely (from the Multalign Viewer window, Preferences... Analysis and set the "Consensus style" to "none"). If your alignment just has two sequences, however, all the columns where there is no bar in the Conservation histogram when the "Conservation style" is set to "identity histogram," or no asterisk when the "Conservation style" is set to "Clustal characters" are those in which the two sequences differ. That is the closest I can get to your request, unfortunately. There is a format of input that lets you color rows and columns in the alignment, but then you'd have to calculate yourself which positions had differing residues and then write out such a file. Maybe too bothersome to be worth it. Such a file is loaded into Multalign Viewer using "Tools... Load SCF/Seqsel File" and the file format is described in: http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/ multalignviewer/jevtrace.html Coming soon: we just added more and fancier options for "Conservation style" which, although they do not address your specific question in this mail, might interest you: http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/ multalignviewer/multalignviewer.html#mavpref-analysis (development documentation; we don't have a release with these features yet) Best, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. meng@cgl.ucsf.edu UCSF Computer Graphics Lab and Babbitt Lab Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/meng/index.html