Assessing the Evolutionary Conservation of Protein Disulfide Bonds.

Studying the evolutionary conservation of proteins can be a valuable tool for understanding its function. At the sequence level, the conservation of each residue can be used to infer the importance of the particular regions of proteins. In the case of protein disulfide bonds, the conservation of the cysteines involved can be used to infer the conservation of the disulfide bond itself. In this chapter, bioinformatics methods are described that can be used to assess the conservation of a protein disulfide bond with a focus on the study of human proteins. Conservation will be assessed at the species and at the human population levels. The methods described make use of publicly available databases and can be applied by any researcher using a standard desktop computer with internet access.