This message is especially directed towards the membrane proteins community. Dear everyone, we are very pleased to announce the release of the Detergent Belt Server ->    http://detbelt.ibcp.fr Following our discovery of a method to quantify detergents around membrane proteins, we have build the detbelt server to allow for a simple _representation of the detergent belt around your protein of interest_. This representation is a simple approximation and grants a rapid estimation of the detergent belt, especially fitted to _biochemists_ to better understand what is going on in your test tube. (Details on the server and the publication of the detergent quantification method are available on the tutorial page). The server allows you to play with different detergents interactively by recomputing the belt in your web browser, which allows you to refine your biochemical hypothesis. The server allows you to add several detergents, each with different values, and will compute the volume associated with these detergents mixtures. It outputs different metrics making it easier to compare detergent-occupied volumes, and a PyMOL script to generate a publication quality image. For the moment, membrane protein pdb file should be pre-oriented using the PPM server procedure as it runs slow on the server; please visit the tutorial web page for more details (see "1"). We are working towards speeding up this process and making it all integrated in the near future. For testing purposes, I attach a pre-oriented pdb so that you can have an idea of the information you can obtain. Finally, we welcome any feedback to this alpha release; we welcome bug reports as well as creative feedback: if you think this tool has some potential for your research, please contact us and we will see what can be done. Wishing you good visualization All the best The DetBelt team -- Vincent Chaptal, PhD Institut de Biologie et Chimie des Protéines Drug Resistance and Membrane Proteins Laboratory 7 passage du Vercors 69007 LYON FRANCE +33 4 37 65 29 01 http://www.ibcp.fr