Abstract
pyCapsid is a python package developed to facilitate the characterization of the dynamics and mechanical units of protein shells and other protein complexes. The package was developed in response to the rapid increase of high-resolution structures, particularly capsids of viruses, requiring multiscale biophysical analyses. Given a protein shell, pyCapsid generates the collective vibrations of its amino-acid residues, identifies quasi-rigid mechanical regions, and maps the results back to the input proteins for interpretation. pyCapsid’s source code is available under MIT License on GitHub (https://github.com/luquelab/pycapsid). It has also been deployed in the two leading python package-management systems, PIP (https://pypi.org/project/pyCapsid/) and Conda (https://anaconda.org/luque_lab/pycapsid). Installation instructions and tutorials are available in the GitHub Page-style online documentation (https://luquelab.github.io/pyCapsid). In addition, users can post issues regarding pyCapsid in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/luquelab/pyCapsid/issues).
Contact Antoni Luque (aluque{at}sdsu.edu).
Supplementary information (SI) Further details and figures on the performance results reported in this article are available in the GitHub repository https://github.com/luquelab/pyCapsid/tree/main/results/performance). A gallery displaying the application of pyCapsid to various protein shells is available on the online documentation (https://luquelab.github.io/pyCapsid/gallery/).
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
