Correlation in Evolution of Adrenergic Receptors with their Interacting Partner

Abstract

The prediction of protein interacting partners with bioinformatics methods has become a topic of increasing interest in recent years. Studies of interacting proteins have found correlated evolution of the sequences of binding partners or coadaptation of interacting partners, such that as a result  substitution or mutation of an amino acid residue in the interface of one protein will select for the coordinated mutation and subsequent substitution of an amino acid in the interface of its binding partner. We have analysed coevolution of receptors and ligands i.e interacting partners by using adrenergic receptors (alpha1,alpha2,beta1,beta2,beta3) as model. We show that there is correlation between the adrenergic receptor and ligand evolutionary distances by analyzing correlation coefficient values and p-values. As p-values validate the correlation results. Phylogenetic trees of receptor and ligand are also analysed and compared to further predict the protein coevolution results.This approach can be applied to a variety of ligand and receptor systems.