Assessing the Evolutionary Conservation of Protein Disulphide 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 disulphide bonds, the conservation of the cysteines involved can be used to infer the conservation of the disulphide bond itself. In this chapter, bioinformatics methods are described that can be used to assess the conservation of a protein disulphide bond with a focus on the study of human proteins. Conservation will be assessed at the species and at the human population level. The methods described make use of publicly available databases and can be applied by any researcher using a standard desktop computer with Internet access.