Before revision:  analysis , which predicts contactsby analyzing residue co-evolution in a single target family, has made good progress due to better statistical and optimization techniques . Different from these single-family EC methods that focus on only a single protein family, this paper presents a joint multi-family EC analysis method that predicts contacts of one target family by jointly modeling residue co-evolution in itself and also (distantly) related familieswith divergent sequences but similar folds , and enforcing their co-evolution pattern consistency based upon their evolutionary distance .
After revision:  analysis , which predicts contactsby analyzing residue co-evolution in a single target family, has made good progress due to better statistical and optimization techniques . Different from these single-family EC methods that focus on only a single protein family, this paper presents a joint multi-family EC analysis method that predicts contacts of one target family by jointly modeling residue co-evolution in both the target family and its related families, which may have divergent sequences but similar folds , and enforcing their co-evolution pattern consistency based upon their evolutionary distance .