Visualisation and integration of G protein-coupled receptor related information help the modelling: Description and applications of the Viseur program

G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) constitute a superfamily of receptors that forms an important therapeutic target. The number of known GPCR sequences and related information increases rapidly. For these reasons, we are developing the Viseur program to integrate the available information related to GPCRs. The Viseur program allows one to interactively visualise and/or modify the sequences, transmembrane areas, alignments, models and results of mutagenesis experiments in an integrated environment. This integration increases the ease of modelling GPCRs: visualisation and manipulation improvements enable easier databank interrogation and interpretation. Unique program features include: (i) automatic construction of ‘Snake-like’ diagrams or hyperlinked GPCR molecular models to HTML or VRML and (ii) automatic access to a mutagenesis data server through the Internet. The novel algorithms or methods involved are presented, followed by the overall complementary features of the program. Finally, we present two applications of the program: (i) an automatic construction of GPCR snake-like diagrams for the GPCRDB WWW server, and (ii) a preparation of the modelling of the 5HT receptor subtypes. The interest of the direct access to mutagenesis results through an alignment and a molecular model are discussed. The Viseur program, which runs on SGI workstations, is freely available and can be used for preparing the modelling of integral membrane proteins or as an alignment editor tool.