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How is structural divergence related to evolutionary information?

Conservation and covariation measures, as other evolutionary analysis, require a high number of distant homologous sequences, therefore a lot of structural divergence can be expected in such divergent alignments. However, most works linking evolutionary and structural information use a single structure ignoring the structural variability inside a protein family. That common practice seems unrealistic to the light of this work. In this work we studied how structural divergence affects conservation and covariation estimations. We uncover that, within a protein family, ~51% of multiple sequence alignment columns change their exposed/buried status between structures. Also, ~53% of residue pairs that are in contact in one structure are not in contact in another structure from the same family. We found out that residue conservation is not directly related to the relative solvent accessible surface area of a single protein structure. Using information from all the available structures rather than from a single representative structure gives more confidence in the structural interpretation of the evolutionary signals. That is particularly important for diverse multiple sequence alignments, where structures can drastically differ. High covariation scores tend to indicate residue contacts that are conserved in the family, therefore, are not suitable to find protein/conformer specific contacts. Our results suggest that structural divergence should be considered for a better understanding of protein function, to transfer annotation by homology and to model protein evolution.