Statistical Tool for Analysis of Residue Couplings

The success of Direct Coupling Analysis (DCA) for protein structure prediction suggests that multiple sequence alignments implicitly contain more structural information than had previously been realized, and prompts deeper investigations of the sequence correlations uncovered by either DCA or other approaches.  To aid such investigations and thereby broaden the utility of and improve DCA, STARC measures the statistical significance of the association between DCA and either 3D structure or correlated patterns associated with functional specificity.  STARC can be used to evaluate the relative performance of DCA methods, their ability to distinguish direct from indirect couplings, and the potential biological relevance and mechanistic implications of alternative conformations and homodimeric interactions.