Patent ID: 7016786

Claim:
A method of identifying one or more positions in a protein family, the method comprising: (a) accessing data representing a multiple sequence alignment (MSA) of a plurality of protein sequences; and (b) identifying one or more evolutionarily conserved amino acid positions within the MSA using the following equation: Δ ⁢ ⁢ G i stat = kT * ⁢ ∑ x ⁢ ⁢ ( ln ⁢ ⁢ P i x P MSA x ) 2 wherein: i is a position in the MSA; ΔG i stat is the conservation energy value for position i; P i x is the probability of amino acid x at position i; P MSA x is the probability of amino acid x in the MSA; and kT* is an energy unit, where k is Boltzmann's constant.