Nat, You read my mind. Having just converted the output of DSSP manually to PDB records last week I was eyeing the source to util.ss wondering how to turn it into a dssp parser.
Ideally util.ss could become a shell that would know (from the environment?) if dssp or similar was installed, then either run dssp and parse the output to assign the ss, or else run the ss asignment code in the current util.ss if no other options were available. The ability to write a pdb with the newly generated ss information would be useful as well (or perhaps pymol already can do this if it knows the protein's ss?). Thanks Russell Poyner I've been fiddling with this for my own work; I wrote a parser in Perl to embed structural annotation in a PDB file based on output from DSSP, STRIDE, or RasMol. Unfortunately it doesn't handle multiple chains yet, but I'm working on making it more general. I suppose since I only use this for loading files into PyMOL, I could just write it in Python as a PyMOL module. . . would that be useful to anyone else?
