Methods for predicting key functional positions
This picture is borrowed from the website maintained by the Whiteway lab at the Biotechnology Research Institute, National Research Council, Montreal.
We are actively pursuing ways to include phylogenetic inference, multiple sequence alignment information, and structural information, into methods for identifying key functional positions. This work has obvious ties to work done by others, most notably Nir Ben Tal and Olivier Lichtarge's work in this area. We want to combine the best of their approaches with our (we believe) high-quality multiple sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees. Since we can use SCI-PHY to find functional subfamilies, we have an additional tool we can use in high-throughput.