Hi all,

I have been dwelling over the following problems and simply do not know how to continue. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

My scenario: I am running a BLAST search against PDB sequences in order to find suitable templates to model my target protein. I have all PDB structures locally installed and the atom_files variable pointing to this directory in my .py scripts.

I basically have 2 questions:

1. From what I understand the modlib/CHAINS_all.seq is used to store the sequences for the PDB structures. Now if I want to use a novel PDB structure as a template which is not included in this list, will I have to manually create the chain sequence in PIR format (with commands/make_chains.py) and append it to the modlib/CHAINS_all.seq file? ALso is there a way to create a CHAIN_all.seq file from all PDB structure files in one go?

2. Since I am already running a BLAST search to find my template structures, I won't be using search.py. In order to create the .ali alignment file which is neccessary for the computation of the final structure prediction of my target sequence, i will need to run malign.py. The problem is, malign takes a .seg file as input. I have not yet found an automated method to generate such a .seg file from a target sequence and template structures found by BLAST. Will I have to create the .seg file manually?

Maybe I am just missing the point and the solution to all my problems is in fact really easy. I guess my main problem boils down to which files can be created by modeller for me and which files need to be generated or edited by hand.

I would greatly appreciate any help.

Regards,

nick