ATTRACT and PTOOLS: Open source programs for protein-protein docking

The prediction of the structure of protein-protein complexes based on structures or structural models of isolated partners is of increasing importance for structural biology and bioinformatics. The ATTRACT program can be used to perform systematic docking searches based on docking energy minimization. It is part of the object-oriented PTools library written in Python and C++. The library contains various routines to manipulate protein structures, to prepare and perform docking searches as well as analyzing docking results. It also intended to facilitate further methodological developments in the area of macromolecular docking that can be easily integrated. Here, we describe the application of PTools to perform systematic docking searches and to analyze the results. In addition, the possibility to perform multi-component docking will also be presented.