This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing theresources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject andinvestigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source,and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed isfor the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator.We have developed a program called Sparky (www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/sparky)for assignment of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra that iswidely used (a few thousand users worldwide) to determine atomicresolution structures of proteins, dna and rna in solution. About 15percent of the 30,000 structures in the Protein Databank were solved byNMR. The basis of the technique is to identify thousands of spectralpeaks that reveal distances between pairs of atoms in the molecule beingstudied. Those distances are used to deduce a consistent 3-dimensionalshape of the molecule. A large part of the analysis involves identifyingthe spectral peaks, that is, determining what atoms they are associatedwith. This process is still largely done interactively by an NMRspectroscopist. A few programs are used for interactive peak assignment,the most popular being Sparky and NMRView.Sparky was developed in 1990 by Don Kneller working in Tack Kuntz's laband in 1996 was taken over by Tom James' NMR lab and Tom Ferrin's ComputerGraphics Lab at UC San Francisco. Many new features were developed andthe program was widely distributed in the period 1996 - 2001. From2001 to 2007 we have provided email support and maintenance but havenot been adding new features to the program. The program is more widelyused than ever.
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