Kinks are functionally important structural features found in the alpha-helices of many proteins, particularly membrane proteins. Structurally, they are points at which a helix abruptly changes direction. Previous kink definition and identification methods often disagree with one another.

Here I describe three novel methods to characterise kinks, which improve on existing approaches. First, Kink Finder, a computational method that consistently locates kinks and estimates the error i...