IDENTIFICATION OF COEVOLVING AMINO ACID PAIRS USING MUTUAL INFORMATION

CRISTINA MARINO BUSLJE; JAVIER SANTOS; JOSE MARIA DELFINO; MORTEN NIELSEN

Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica

Workshop; International Symposium of the International Master of Biomedical Sciences; 2008

University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg (Germany). School of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, UBA. Argentina

.O {font-size:149%;} <!--.sld {left:0px !important; width:6.0in !important; height:8.0in !important; font-size:138% !important;} --> ABSTRACT Motivation: The prediction of the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its sequence is one of the most challenging and largely unsolved problems in structural biology. Mutual information theory is often applied to predict positional correlations in a multiple sequence alignment (MSA) to make possible the analysis of those positions structurally or functionally important in a given fold or protein family. Precise identification of residues that share mutual information could provide insights into the structure and function of a protein. Accurate identification of coevolving positions in protein sequences is difficult due to the high background signal imposed by phylogeny and noise. Several methods have been proposed using mutual information to identify coevolving amino acids in protein families. Availability: Source code upon request.