ESPript  3.0



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What is ESPript?
  • ESPript, 'Easy Sequencing in PostScript', is a program which renders sequence similarities and secondary structure information from aligned sequences for analysis and publication purpose.


ESPript figure
Excerpt from a generated ESPript figure (full size in PDF)


  • Key features:

    • ESPript is a utility, whose output is a PostScript / PDF / PNG or TIFF file of aligned sequences with graphical enhancements.
    • Its main input is a file of pre-aligned sequences in Clustal, FASTA, MultAlin, NPS@ or ProDom format.
    • The program calculates a similarity score for each residue of the aligned sequences.
    • Optional files allow further rendering.

  • A typical ESPript figure shows:

    • aligned sequences,
    • similarities,
    • consensus,
    • accessibility,
    • hydropathy,
    • secondary structures elements,
    • intermolecular contacts,
    • user-supplied markers.

  • Biotool Web servers interfaced with ESPript:

    • ENDscript:
    • ENDscript is a friendly Web server, which extracts and renders a comprehensive analysis of primary to quaternary protein structure information in an automated way. Several ENDscript representations are produced with ESPript.

    • ARDOCK:
    • ARDOCK is a Web server for the study of protein surfaces. Arbitrary docking can reveal potential interaction sites on the surface of a protein using docking with a set of 25 random protein "probes".

    • T-Coffee:
    • T-Coffee is a collection of tools for computing, evaluating and manipulating multiple alignments of DNA, RNA, protein sequences and structures.

    • NPS@:
    • NPS@ is an interactive Web server dedicated to protein sequence analysis. NPS@ can carry out multiple sequence alignments with ClustalW or MultAlin and resulting outputs can be rendered with ESPript.

    • MultAlin:
    • MultAlin is a multiple sequence alignment program with hierarchical clustering. Resulting alignments can be rendered with ESPript.

    • ProDom:
    • ProDom is a protein domain family database constructed automatically by clustering homologous segments. ESPript is used to print high-quality representations of domain families.



Google Scholar citations: ESPript 1 / ESPript 2 / ESPript 3


Terms of use
  • ESPript 3.x is developed and maintained by Patrice GOUET and Xavier ROBERT in the "Retroviruses and Structural Biochemistry" research team of the "Molecular Microbiology and Structural Biochemistry" laboratory (UMR5086 CNRS / Lyon University). ESPript 3.x is a major upgrade of ESPript 2.x, which was created by Patrice GOUET and Emmanuel COURCELLE.
  • ESPript is provided as a service to the scientific community and can be used free of charge for research and educational purposes without restriction.
  • When publishing data resulting from usage of ESPript, please use the following citation:
    • Robert, X. and Gouet, P. (2014) "Deciphering key features in protein structures with the new ENDscript server". Nucl. Acids Res. 42(W1), W320-W324 - doi: 10.1093/nar/gku316 (freely accessible online).
  • Send your messages to espript@ibcp.fr, if you have questions, suggestions or if you want to be informed about program releases.



SBGrid © 2005-2024 The ESPript authors & CNRS - Contact: espript@ibcp.fr
ESPript is an SBGrid supported application


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