A quick note of test of LigPlot on my Mac.
==background ===
If you have ever used the PDBSum service, you may notice many provided useful information including the protein-protein interaction/interface, protein-ligand or protein-DNA (or RNA) interaction/interface, Rama plot, topology and sequence.
For example (see image below), the banner of PDB file (2XUV) entry in PDBSum provides links of “protein, “ligands”, protein-protein interaction” and “clefts” for users to see the detail molecular interactions. When you click the link “ligands” in the banner or the “SO4” link in the “Contents” at left corner, you will see a image generated by LigPlot which shows both hydrophobic and hydrogen bonding interactions between ligand and protein.
=== installation on Mac =====
Following by the instruction described at LigPlot official site, I downloaded the LigPlot binary files (Linux/Unix version) to run it on my iMac (10.6.8).
After uncompressing the hbplus and ligplot file, as instructed in the “install.doc” text file, 3 steps are essential to make ligplot run well on Mac OS 10.6:
1. user has to manually compile some files in ligplot (GCC must be installed first) :
cc -o ligplot ligplot.c -lm
cc -o hbadd hbadd.c -lm
cc -o dimer dimer.c
2. run “make” in the hbplus to compile all required C files.
3. edit either tcsh, csh or bash shell environment file as suggested in the “install.doc” file.
=== run LigPlot on Mac, an example ===
I have used HADDOCK to generate some protein-RNA docked model and LigPlot was used to see the protein-RNA contacts. Here is the example result:
Note: The ligplot author has another specific version called NucPlot to draw the protein-DNA or protein-RNA contacts, I didn’t try it because it just draw the molecular contacts in different style.