Interactive Analysis of Functional Residues in Protein Families

A protein’s function depends on functional residues that determine its binding specificity or its catalytic activity, but these residues are typically not considered when annotating a protein’s function. To help biologists investigate the functional residues of proteins, we developed two interactive web-based tools, SitesBLAST and Sites on a Tree. Given a protein sequence, SitesBLAST finds homologs that have known functional residues and shows whether the functional residues are conserved. Sites on a Tree shows how functional residues vary across a protein family by showing them on a phylogenetic tree. These tools are available at http://papers.genomics.lbl.gov/sites. IMPORTANCE For most microbes of interest, a genome sequence is available, but the function of its proteins is not known. Instead, proteins' functions are predicted from their similarity to other protein sequences. Within a protein's sequence, a few key residues are most important for function, such as catalyzing a chemical reaction or determining what it binds. But most function prediction tools do not take these key residues into account. We developed interactive tools for identifying functional residues in a protein sequence by comparing it to proteins with known functional residues. Our tools also make it easy to compare key residues across many similar proteins. This should help biologists check if a protein's function is predicted correctly, or to predict if groups of similar proteins have conserved functions.