Residue Communities Reveal Evolutionary Signatures of Protein Function

Naturally co-occurring amino acids, term coevolution, in a protein family play a significant role in both protein engineering and folding, and it is expanding in recent years from the studies of the effects of single-site mutations to the complete re-design of a protein and its folding, especially in structure prediction. Here we report an approach that can identify the evolutionary signatures (highly ordered networks of coupled amino acids, termed "residue communities", RCs) from protein homologous sequences. The method provides access to apply the spectrum analysis on evolutionary coupling analysis (SAEC) for inferring RCs in proteins and their important roles in protein function