FastContact is an algorithm for the rapid estimate of contact and binding free energies for protein–protein complex structures. It is based on a statistically determined desolvation contact potential and

Coulomb The coulomb (symbol: C) is the unit of electric charge in the International System of Units (SI). It is defined to be equal to the electric charge delivered by a 1 ampere current in 1 second, with the elementary charge ''e'' as a defining c ...

electrostatic Electrostatics is a branch of physics that studies slow-moving or stationary electric charges. Since classical times, it has been known that some materials, such as amber, attract lightweight particles after rubbing. The Greek word (), mean ...

s with a distance-dependent

dielectric constant The relative permittivity (in older texts, dielectric constant) is the permittivity of a material expressed as a ratio with the electric permittivity of a vacuum. A dielectric is an insulating material, and the dielectric constant of an insul ...

. The application also reports residue contact free energies that rapidly highlight the hotspots of the interaction. The programme was written in Fortran 77 by Carlos J. Camacho and Chao Zhang at the Department of Computational Biology,

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

, PA. A web server for running FastContact online or downloading the binary was set up by P. Christoph Champ in July 2005.

References

External links

FastContact binaries
— binaries are freely available for download (with documentation).
FastContact Server
— set up by P. Christoph Champ in July 2005.
FastContact Wiki
Bioinformatics Fortran software {{bioinformatics-stub