Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-27-2015
Abstract
Statistical coupling analysis (SCA) is a method for analyzing multiple sequence alignments that was used to identify groups of coevolving residues termed “sectors”. The method applies spectral analysis to a matrix obtained by combining correlation information with sequence conservation. It has been asserted that the protein sectors identified by SCA are functionally significant, with different sectors controlling different biochemical properties of the protein. Here we reconsider the available experimental data and note that it involves almost exclusively proteins with a single sector. We show that in this case sequence conservation is the dominating factor in SCA, and can alone be used to make statistically equivalent functional predictions. Therefore, we suggest shifting the experimental focus to proteins for which SCA identifies several sectors. Correlations in protein alignments, which have been shown to be informative in a number of independent studies, would then be less dominated by sequence conservation.
Included in
Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology Commons, Biology Commons, Biostatistics Commons
Comments
This article originally appeared in PLoS Computational Biology, available at DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004091
© 2015 Teşileanu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.