Monday, September 5, 2011

Molecular evolution of protein onformational changes revealed by a network of evolutionarily-coupled residues



 Hi,

I have seen many forms for coevolution but one which tries to explain protein conformational changes using protein sequence coevolution is unremarkable. This article  is published in MBE and can raise interest of many. Author says in very beginning that they observed coevolving residues in flexible region of protein, which itself doesn't make much sense to me as coevolution is mostly complemented by co-conservation  but let see how they try to explain it. 

For estimating the conformational changes between two forms of similar protein they have used MMTSB tool set, which can be interesting for measuring many parameters in protein structures. Have a look here. For correlation three different measures were computed, CN and SA, CN and FIR, CN and Ca RMSD, where CN stands for coupling number, SA for solvent accessibility and FIR for fractional changes. 


An illustration is shown here for CN calculations,


 
Validation of the method on two the structures is shown below:






Surprisingly enough, they have CN residues in loops which are rarely conserved and how can we explain that coevolution we are looking at is not merely random changes due to less conservation in coupling residues.

Result and discussion session confer the importance of CN in protein motion and significance was shown. If I haven't mentioned so far then Coevolution score was calculated by using McLachlan-based substitution matrix. 

Here is last figure explained in the paper,
 

 



 
That's all and let see if I can also reproduce similar results using higher order of coevolution calculations.

Vi sis,


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