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Software Developed by the Donald Lab

NASCA

Download | User Manual | License | Contact

Welcome to the website for the NASCA (NOE Assignment and Side-Chain Assignment) software. Here, you can download the newest version of the software, read the user manual and license agreement, or e-mail inquiries.

NASCA is an automated program for side-chain resonance assignment and nuclear Overhauser effect (NOE) assignment from NOESY data. It does not require data from TOCSY experiments. NASCA is integrated with a graphical user interface (GUI). NASCA is developed in the lab of Prof. Bruce Donald at Duke University.

The current version of NASCA casts the assignment problem into a Markov Random Field (MRF), and extends and applies combinatorial protein design algorithms to compute optimal assignments that best interpret the NMR data. The complexity of the combinatorial search is reduced by using a dead-end elimination (DEE) algorithm, which prunes side-chain resonance assignments that are provably not part of the optimal solution. Then an A* search algorithm is employed to find a set of optimal side-chain resonance assignments that best fit the NMR data. These side-chain resonance assignments are then used to resolve the NOE assignment ambiguity. More details about NASCA can be found in the NASCA manual and our primary publications:

• Jianyang Zeng, Pei Zhou, Bruce R. Donald. Protein Side-Chain Resonance Assignment and NOE Assignment Using RDC-Defined Backbones without TOCSY Data. Journal of Biomolecular NMR, 2011 (in press).
• Jianyang Zeng, Pei Zhou, Bruce R. Donald. A Markov Random Field Framework for Protein Side-Chain Resonance Assignment. In: Proceedings of The Fourteenth Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB), Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Springer Berlin, pages 550-570.

NASCA is free software and can be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (optionally) any later version. NASCA is distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details. Full licensing details, including citation requirements for the various different modules of the software, are found here.