PHACE: Phylogeny-Aware Co-Evolution

Abstract

The co-evolution trends of amino acids within or between genes offer valuable insights into protein structure and function. Existing tools for uncovering co-evolutionary signals primarily rely on multiple sequence alignments (MSAs), often neglecting considerations of phylogenetic relatedness and shared evolutionary history. Here, we present a novel approach based on the substitution mapping of amino acid changes onto the phylogenetic tree. We categorize amino acids into two groups: tolerable and intolerable, and assign them to each position based on the position dynamics concerning the observed amino acids. Amino acids deemed tolerable are those observed phylogenetically independently and multiple times at a specific position, signifying the positions tolerance to that alteration. Gaps are regarded as a third character type, and we only consider phylogenetically independent altered gap characters. Our algorithm is based on a tree traversal process through the nodes and computes the total amount of substitution per branch based on the probability differences of two groups of amino acids and gaps between neighboring nodes. We employ an MSA-masking approach to mitigate misleading artifacts from poorly aligned regions. When compared to tools utilizing phylogeny (CAPS and CoMap) and state-of-the-art MSA-based approaches (DCA, GaussDCA, PSICOV, and MIp), our method exhibits significantly superior accuracy in identifying co-evolving position pairs, as measured by statistical metrics including MCC, AUC, and F1 score. PHACEs success arises from its ability to consider the frequently neglected phylogenetic dependency.