A simple statistical method for estimating type-II (cluster-specific) functional divergence of protein sequences

Abstract

Predicting functional amino acid residues in silico is important for comparative genomics. In this paper, we focus on the issue of how to statistically identify cluster-specific amino acid residues that are related to the functional divergence after gene duplication. We approach this problem using a framework based on site-specific shift of amino acid property (type-II functional divergence), as opposed to site-specific shift of evolutionary rate (type-I functional divergence). An efficient statistical procedure is implemented to facilitate the development of phylogenomic database for cluster-specific residues of large-scale protein families. Our method has the following features: 1) statistical testing of the type-II functional divergence and 2) the site-specific Bayesian profile to measure how amino acid residues contribute to type-II (cluster-specific) functional divergence. Consequently, one may obtain the posterior probability for "functional" cluster-specific residues. Case studies are presented and indicate that radical cluster-specific residues are responsible for most of inferred type-II functional divergence, whereas conserved cluster-specific residues appear less than even those imperfect radical cluster-specific residues to this type of functional divergence.