TY - JOUR T1 - BioShell-Threading: versatile Monte Carlo package for protein 3D threading. JF - BMC Bioinformatics Y1 - 2014 A1 - Pawel Gniewek A1 - Andrzej KoliƄski A1 - Andrzej Kloczkowski A1 - Dominik Gront AB - BACKGROUND: The comparative modeling approach to protein structure prediction inherently relies on a template structure. Before building a model such a template protein has to be found and aligned with the query sequence. Any error made on this stage may dramatically affects the quality of result. There is a need, therefore, to develop accurate and sensitive alignment protocols. RESULTS: BioShell threading software is a versatile tool for aligning protein structures, protein sequences or sequence profiles and query sequences to a template structures. The software is also capable of suboptimal alignment generation. It can be executed as an application from the UNIX command line, or as a set of Java classes called from a script or a Java application. The implemented Monte Carlo search engine greatly facilitates the development and benchmarking of new alignment scoring schemes evenwhen the functions exhibit non-deterministic polynomial-time complexity. CONCLUSIONS: Numerical experiments indicate that the new threading application offers template detection abilities and provides much better alignments than other methods. The package along with documentation and examples is available at: http://bioshell.pl/threading3d. VL - 15 IS - 1 ER -