MANSEK and SUNHCA. Two interactive programs for the hydrophobic cluster analysis of protein sequences

Hydrophobic cluster analysis (HCA) is an efficient method foranalysing and comparing the amino acid sequences of proteins.It relies on two–dimensional representations of the sequencespresently generated by simple plot programs working on microcomputers.Two interactive programs, MANSEK. and SUNHCA, are describedhere that operate from Vax and Sun workstations respectively.These programs allow the display of several protein sequencesin the form of two–dimensional helical plots suitablefor HCA. Several tedious, repetitive and timeconsuming stepsof HCA have been suppressed by implementing several featuressuch as interactive on–screen manipulations (zoom, translations)of the plots and HCA score calculations on segments chosen bythe user. Plots on paper can be obtained through hard copiesor plotting subroutines.