PsychoProt: Physical CHemistry Of Protein variability

A webserver for the analysis of protein sequence variability in terms of physicochemical descriptors of the amino acids.

Relevant articles: Proof of concept @ PLoS One 2015 - Server description and examples @ BMC Bioinf. 2016 - Reviewed in Curr. Opin. Struct. Biol. 2016

Concept art: How protein traits emerge from amino acid properties

This webserver is described in this article. For a given dataset (from alignments, deep-sequencing experiments, etc.) the main tool will find out which amino acid properties (volume, hydrophobicity, etc.) best explain the probability of finding each amino acid at each position of the protein sequence. Such kind of analysis helps retrieve rich information about the physicochemical constraints to protein variation, which has implications on protein design, engineering and evolution as illustrated in this application to deep-sequencing data on a library of all mutants at all positions of an enzyme.