Interactive Protein Manipulation

We describe an interactive visualization and modeling program for the creation of protein structures ``from scratch.'' The input to our program is an amino acid sequence~-- decoded from a gene~-- and a sequence of predicted secondary structure types for each amino acid~-- provided by external structure prediction programs. Our program can be used in the set-up phase of a protein structure prediction process; the structures created with it serve as input for a subsequent global internal energy minimization, or another method of protein structure prediction. Our program supports basic visualization methods for protein structures, interactive manipulation based on inverse kinematics, and visualization guides to aid a user in creating ``good'' initial structures