ChiraKit: an online tool for the analysis of circular dichroism spectroscopy data
Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is an established biophysical technique to study chiral molecules. CD allows investigating conformational changes under varying experimental conditions and has been used to understand secondary structure, folding, and binding of proteins and nucleic acids. Here, we present ChiraKit, a user-friendly, online, and open-source tool to process raw CD data and perform advanced analysis. ChiraKit features include the calculation of protein secondary structure with the SELCON3 and SESCA algorithms, estimation of peptide helicity using the helix-ensemble model, the fitting of thermal/chemical unfolding or user-defined models, and the decomposition of spectra through singular value decomposition or principal component analysis. ChiraKit can be accessed at https://spc.embl-hamburg.de/.
Authors
- Nykola C. Jones (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4081-6405)
- San Hadži (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5615-7918)
- María García-Alai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5200-7816)
- Uroš Zavrtanik (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7445-6850)
- Osvaldo Burastero (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4089-0434)
- Søren Vrønning Hoffmann (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8018-5433)
- Lucas A. Defelipe (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7859-7300)
Institutions
- University of Ljubljana (SI)
- Aarhus University (DK)
- European Molecular Biology Laboratory (DE)
- Centre for Structural Systems Biology (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nucleic Acids Research
- Published
- 2025-04-24
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf350
- Citations
- 8
- Primary Topic
- Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry Studies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 6.45
Funders
- Aarhus Universitet
- ARISE-The Scoliosis Research Trust
- Society for Research in Child Development
- European Molecular Biology Laboratory
- European Commission
- Javna Agencija za Raziskovalno Dejavnost RS
- H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions