CheckShift: automatic correction of inconsistent chemical shift referencing

The construction of a consistent protein chemical shift database is an important step toward making more extensive use of this data in structural studies. Unfortunately, progress in this direction has been hampered by the quality of the available data, particularly with respect to chemical shift referencing, which is often either inaccurate or inconsistently annotated. Preprocessing of the data is therefore required to detect and correct referencing errors. We have developed a program for performing this task, based on the comparison of reported and expected chemical shift distributions. This program, named CheckShift, does not require additional data and is therefore applicable to data sets where structures are not available. Therefore CheckShift provides the possibility to re-reference chemical shifts prior to their use as structural constraints.