Abstract
During evolution, structure, and function of proteins are remarkably conserved, whereas amino-acid sequences vary strongly between homologous proteins. Structural conservation constrains sequence variability and forces different residues to coevolve, i.e., to show correlated patterns of amino-acid occurrences. However, residue correlation may result from direct coupling, e.g., by a contact in the folded protein, or be induced indirectly via intermediate residues. To use empirically observed correlations for predicting residue–residue contacts, direct and indirect effects have to be disentangled. Here we present mechanistic details on how to achieve this using a methodology called Direct Coupling Analysis (DCA). DCA has been shown to produce highly accurate estimates of amino-acid pairs that have direct reciprocal constraints in evolution. Specifically, we provide instructions and protocols on how to use the algorithmic implementations of DCA starting from data extraction to predicted-contact visualization in contact maps or representative protein structures.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics sponsored by the NSF (Grant PHY-0822283) and by NSF-MCB-1214457. JNO is a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research sponsored by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.
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Morcos, F., Hwa, T., Onuchic, J.N., Weigt, M. (2014). Direct Coupling Analysis for Protein Contact Prediction. In: Kihara, D. (eds) Protein Structure Prediction. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1137. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0366-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0366-5_5
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