Finding coevolving amino acid residues using row and column weighting of mutual information and multi-dimensional amino acid representation

Background Some amino acid residues functionally interact with each other. This interaction will result in an evolutionary co-variation between these residues – coevolution. Our goal is to find these coevolving residues. Results We present six new methods for detecting coevolving residues. Among other things, we suggest measures that are variants of Mutual Information, and measures that use a multidimensional representation of each residue in order to capture the physico-chemical similarities between amino acids. We created a benchmarking system, in silico, able to evaluate these methods through a wide range of realistic conditions. Finally, we use the combination of different methods as a way of improving performance. Conclusion Our best method (Row and Column Weighed Mutual Information) has an estimated accuracy increase of 63% over Mutual Information. Furthermore, we show that the combination of different methods is efficient, and that the methods are quite sensitive to the different conditions tested.