Gotta have that Mechismo

Staphylococcus aureus alpha hemolysin. Not terribly relevant here but it looks nice. Structural view c/o Dcrjsr and Vincent Chen on Wikimedia Commons.

I found out about Mechismo today - it's a server-based tool for exploring the potential impacts of changes in protein sequences and structures. It will accept a list of potential variants of a protein (even just phosphorylation of a particular site, for example) and then return lists and networks of the potential impact. It's nicely presented and appears to be quite flexible. Here's my favorite part, though: unlike some other tools, it's not species-limited and looks like it should work with virtually any protein with an accession number. It will be worth trying out a bit more with some real data.

Here's the citation for the original paper (not quite sure how I missed it as it's been online since this past November, but it's hard to catch everything):
Betts, M. J. et al. Mechismo: predicting the mechanistic impact of mutations and modifications on molecular interactions. Nucleic Acids Res. 43, e10– (2014).