November 20, Sunday
12:00 – 14:00
Detection and Reduction of Evolutionary Noise in Correlated Mutation
Bio-Informatics seminar
Lecturer : Orly Noivirt
Affiliation : Department of Structural Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science
Location : 201/58
Host : Dr. Danny Barash
Direct or indirect inter-residue interactions in proteins are often reflected by
mutations at one site that compensate for mutations at another site.
Various bioinformatic methods have been developed for detecting such correlated
mutations in order to obtain information about intra- and inter-protein interactions.
Herein, we show by carrying out a correlated mutation analysis for non-interacting
proteins that the signal due to inter-residue interactions is of similar magnitude
to the 'noise' that arises from other evolutionary processes related to common ancestry.
A new method for detecting correlated mutations is presented that reduces
this evolutionary noise by taking into account evolutionary distances in the protein
family. It is shown that this method yields better signal-to-noise ratios and, thus,
can much better resolve, for example, correlated mutations that reflect true
inter-residue interactions.