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Mutual Information Without The Influence Of Phylogeny Or Entropy Dramatically Improves Residue Contact Prediction, Stanley Dunn, Lindi Wahl, Gregory Gloor

Stanley D Dunn

Motivation: Compensating alterations during the evolution of protein families give rise to coevolving positions that contain important structural and functional information. However, a high background composed of random noise and phylogenetic components interferes with the identification of coevolving positions.

Results: We have developed a rapid, simple and general method based on information theory that accurately estimates the level of background mutual information for each pair of positions in a given protein family. Removal of this background results in a metric, MIp, that correctly identifies substantially more coevolving positions in protein families than any existing method. A significant fraction of these …