Q: How will BASILIScan help me with expressing my proteins?

A: BASILIScan will try and find the closest homologue of your protein with the lowest possible degree of intrinsic disorder. Many problems during recombinant protein expression and purification are caused by excess intrinsic disorder. BASILIScan can cut short the time you would have to spend trying out many homologues experimentally.

Q: How likely is it that a homologue like this exists?

A: A screen of every protein in the human proteome with BASILIScan revealed that 74% of human proteins had closely related sequences of significantly less intrinsic disorder in other species. See the corresponding publication for more information.

Q: How long will it take?

A: No longer than a few minutes. All you need to do is to download and run one executable file from this website (Downloads section). The program is intuitive and simple. The search is performed in just a few seconds!

Q: Can I run BASILIScan straight from the website?

A: No. At the moment you need to download the file and run the program from your own computer. In the near future, though, an on-line version should become available.

Q: I am only interested in expressing a protein domain. Can I still use BASILIScan?

A: Information learned from submitting a fragment of a complete ORF will be limited. Statistics computed by BASILIScan, in particular the FLEX score, will always be based on complete ORFs extracted from UniprotKB/Swissprot. However, using the “Trace” and “Align” tools in the BASILIScan’s results window will allow you to compare the extent of disorder in a multiple sequence alignment, even if your input sequence is a protein fragment. You can then navigate to the region of interest in your protein.