An automatic method for assessing structural importance of amino acid positions.

ABSTRACT:

Background

A great deal is known about the qualitative aspects of the sequence-structure relationship, for example that buried residues are usually more conserved between structurally similar homologues, but no attempts have been made to quantitate the relationship between evolutionary conservation at a sequence position and change to global tertiary structure. In this paper we demonstrate that the Spearman correlation between sequence and structural change is suitable for this purpose.

Results

Buried residues, bends, cysteines, prolines and leucines were significantly more likely to occupy positions highly correlated with structural change than expected by chance. Some buried residues were found to be less informative than expected, particularly residues involved in active

SUBMITTER: Sadowski MI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2667441 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature