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Updated: Mar 27, 2026

Determining the Likelihood of Variant Pathogenicity Using Amino Acid-level Signal-to-Noise Analysis of Genetic Variation
Published on: January 16, 2019
The intolerance to functional genetic variation of protein domains predicts the localization of pathogenic mutations
Ayal B Gussow1,2, Slavé Petrovski3,4, Quanli Wang5
1Institute for Genomic Medicine, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. abg2164@columbia.edu.
Abstract:
Ranking human genes based on their tolerance to functional genetic variation can greatly facilitate patient genome interpretation. It is well established, however, that different parts of proteins can have different functions, suggesting that it will ultimately be more informative to focus attention on functionally distinct portions of genes. Here we evaluate the intolerance of genic sub-regions using two biological sub-region classifications. We show that the intolerance scores of these sub-regions significantly correlate with reported pathogenic mutations. This observation extends the utility of intolerance scores to indicating where pathogenic mutations are mostly likely to fall within genes.
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