An automatic method for assessing structural importance of amino acid positions

摘要

BackgroundA 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.