Valdar William S J
Biomolecular Structure and Modelling Unit, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Proteins. 2002 Aug 1;48(2):227-41. doi: 10.1002/prot.10146.
The importance of a residue for maintaining the structure and function of a protein can usually be inferred from how conserved it appears in a multiple sequence alignment of that protein and its homologues. A reliable metric for quantifying residue conservation is desirable. Over the last two decades many such scores have been proposed, but none has emerged as a generally accepted standard. This work surveys the range of scores that biologists, biochemists, and, more recently, bioinformatics workers have developed, and reviews the intrinsic problems associated with developing and evaluating such a score. A general formula is proposed that may be used to compare the properties of different particular conservation scores or as a measure of conservation in its own right.
一个残基对于维持蛋白质结构和功能的重要性通常可从其在该蛋白质及其同源物的多序列比对中显示出的保守程度推断出来。需要一种可靠的指标来量化残基保守性。在过去二十年里，人们提出了许多这样的评分，但没有一个成为普遍接受的标准。这项工作考察了生物学家、生物化学家以及最近的生物信息学工作者所开发的一系列评分，并审视了与开发和评估此类评分相关的内在问题。提出了一个通用公式，可用于比较不同特定保守评分的性质，或其本身作为一种保守性度量。
