The Importance of Weakly Co-Evolving Residue Networks in Proteins is Revealed by Visual Analytics.

ABSTRACT: Small changes in a protein's core packing produce changes in function, and even small changes in function bias species fitness and survival. Therefore individually deleterious mutations should be evolutionarily coupled with compensating mutations that recover fitness. Co-evolving pairs of mutations should be littered across evolutionary history. Despite longstanding intuition, the results of co-evolution analyses have largely disappointed expectations. Regardless of the statistics applied, only a small majority of the most strongly co-evolving residues are typically found to be in contact, and much of the "meaning" of observed co-evolution has been opaque. In a medium-sized protein of 300 amino acids, there are almost 20 million potentially-important interdependencies. It is impossible to

SUBMITTER: Mohan S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9580873 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature