Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Development Of An Unbiased Statistical Method For The Analysis Of Unigenic Evolution, Colleen D. Behrsin, Chris J. Brandl, David W. Litchfield, Brian H. Shilton, Lindi M. Wahl

Biochemistry Publications

Background: Unigenic evolution is a powerful genetic strategy involving random mutagenesis of a single gene product to delineate functionally important domains of a protein. This method involves selection of variants of the protein which retain function, followed by statistical analysis comparing expected and observed mutation frequencies of each residue. Resultant mutability indices for each residue are averaged across a specified window of codons to identify hypomutable regions of the protein. As originally described, the effect of changes to the length of this averaging window was not fully eludicated. In addition, it was unclear when sufficient functional variants had been examined …