A p p l i c a t i o n o f M u t u a l Information measures to find coevolved positions between proteins in viral families

JAVIER ISERTE; FRANCO SIMONETTI; CRISTINA MARINO BUSLJE

Rosario

Congreso; 4to. Congreso Argentino de Bioinformática y Biología Computacional (4CAB2C) y 4ta. Conferencia Internacional de la Sociedad Iberoamericana de Bioinformática (SolBio); 2013

Asociación Argentina de Bioinformática y Biología Computacional (A2B2C) and Sociedad Iberoamericana de Bioinformática (SolBio)

Background.Mutual Information (MI) is a method used for detecting covarying positions in proteinfamilies.Its utilization can be impaired by several drawbacks, mainly: requirement of largenumbers of sequences and signal noise imposed by phylogenetic relationships.Several modified measures based on MI were developed in the last years to overcomethese difficulties. MI measures are commonly applied to detect covarying residues in asingle protein (intra protein), but it can also be applied to detect covariation betweenresidues of different proteins (inter proteins). The major difficulty for the detection ofcovariation between proteins is to obtain a large set of protein sequences for which weknow their evolutionary relationship (organism co-localization and orthology). Thatcan be overcome deriving the sequences from full genomes, making viruses a suitableand unexplored candidate model to study coevolution between proteins. Detection ofcovarying residues between proteins could help to predict protein interactions andprovide insights into important biological mechanisms. Also, this could be used todetect important functional residues not conserved in viral proteins that areundetected by other methods.