Frustraevo: a web server to localize and quantify the conservation of local energetic frustration in protein families

Abstract

According to the Principle of Minimal Frustration, folded proteins can only have a minimal number of strong energetic conflicts in their native states. However, not all interactions are energetically optimized for folding but some remain in energetic conflict, i.e. they are highly frustrated. This remaining local energetic frustration has been shown to be statistically correlated with distinct functional aspects such as protein-protein interaction sites, allosterism and catalysis. Fuelled by the recent breakthroughs in efficient protein structure prediction that have made available good quality models for most proteins, we have developed a strategy to calculate local energetic frustration within large protein families and quantify its conservation over evolutionary time. Based on this evolutionary information we can identify how stability and functional constraints have appeared at the common ancestor of the family and have been maintained over the course of evolution. Here, we present FrustraEvo, a web server tool to calculate and quantify the conservation of local energetic frustration in protein families.