A Strategy for Detection of Structural Conserved Regions and Contacts in Protein Superfamilies: Application to the PLP-Dependent Enzymes

During the last few years, structural and genomic projects provided us with a wealth of biological information that now opens new prospects of understanding life and evolution at the molecular level [1]. In the next future, one of the main challenges will be the organization and the interpretation of this exponentially growing amount of data. In this work, we show how the rational application of computational techniques can be exploited to derive a deeper knowledge of the mechanisms underlying protein folding and evolution of protein superfamilies. In particular, the application of such techniques to the case of the fold-type I PLP-dependent enzymes is described.