ChiraKit, an online tool for the analysis of circular dichroism spectroscopy data

Abstract

Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is an established biophysical technique to study chiral molecules. CD allows investigating conformational changes under varying experimental conditions and has been used to understand secondary structure, folding and binding of proteins and nucleic acids. Here, we present ChiraKit, a user-friendly, online, open-source tool to process raw CD data and perform advanced analysis. ChiraKit features include the calculation of protein secondary structure with the SELCON3 and SESCA algorithms, estimation of peptide helicity using the helix-ensemble model, the fitting of thermal/chemical unfolding or user-defined models, and the decomposition of spectra through singular value decomposition (SVD) or principal component analysis (PCA). ChiraKit can be accessed at https://spc.embl-hamburg.de/.