About ProScan

ProScan is a web server that provides guidance in identifying favorable proline substitutions given a protein structure. It is is developed by the Pierce Lab at the Institute for Biocience and Biotechnology Research and the University of Maryland. ProScan is free to all users and there is no login requirement. ProScan does not use any tracking cookies

Targeted proline substitutions has proven to be an effective strategy in protein engineering. Due to the cyclic nature of its side chain, proline has a uniquely rigid structure that can stabilize a specific protein conformation and/or modulate protein dynamics. Examples of successful proline designs include:

• The key proline substitution in the "SOSIP" HIV envelope glycoprotein design
• The two proline substitutions to stabilize the SARS-CoV-2 prefusion spike, which has enabled structural characterization and has been used in multiple vaccines
• A proline substitution to stabilize a key epitope in HCV E2 which improved antigenicity and immunogenicity

ProScan was created to help guide protein design efforts that incorporate proline mutations by utilizing a mix of physics-based criteria and machine learning approaches to predict favorable proline substitutions. ProScan outputs these predictions along with structural information to help select the best potential residues for mutation to proline with an average runtime of under two minutes. Resources used by ProScan include DSSP, ProteinMPNN, Plotly, and NGL Viewer

If you use ProScan in your work, please cite us:

Nathaniel Felbinger, Helder V Ribeiro-Filho, Brian G Pierce, Proscan: a structure-based proline design web server, Nucleic Acids Research, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkae408 (Link)

For questions or comments regarding the server please contact Nathaniel Felbinger at nfelbing@umd.edu