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How frequent are correlated changes in families of protein sequences? Export

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 91, No. 1. (4 January 1994), pp. 98-102.

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correlated mutation

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A loss-of-function point mutation in a protein is often rescued by an additional mutation that compensates for the original physical change. According to one hypothesis, such compensation would be most effective in maintaining a structural motif if the two mutated residues were spatial neighbors. If this hypothesis were correct, one would expect that many such compensatory mutations have occurred during evolution and that present-day protein families show some degree of correlation in the occurrence of amino acid residues at positions whose side chains are in contact. Here, a statistical theory is presented which allows evaluation of correlations in a family of aligned protein sequences by assigning a scalar metric (such as charge or side-chain volume) to each type of amino acid and calculating correlation coefficients of these quantities at different positions. For the family of myoglobins it is found that there is a high correlation between fluctuations in neighboring charges. The correlation is close to what would be expected for total conservation of local charge. For the metric side-chain volume, on the other hand, no correlation could be found.


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