title: Investigating co-evolution of functionally associated phosphosites in human.
abstract: Phosphorylation is essential for protein function and signal transduction in eukaryotic cells. With the rapid development of mass spectrometry technology, a large number of phosphosites are identified. However, high-throughput methods of functional characterization for phosphosites are still scarce. In this study, we inspected if the co-evolution property can be used as an indicator to explore function of phosphosites through investigating co-evolutionary relationship between functionally associated phosphosites in human. In practice, the evolution attributes of phosphosites were represented with phylogenetic profiles, and then co-evolutionary correlations of functionally associated phosphosites were detected on three levels: (1) phosphosites within one protein; (2) phosphosites in different proteins participating in the same signal transduction pathways, and (3) general phosphosites. Results of the detection show that co-evolution is a general property of functionally associated phosphosites. This finding suggests to some degree that it is feasible to use the co-evolution property in exploring the function of phosphosites and investigating the functional association between them.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Systems Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yueyang Rd., Shanghai, 200031, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Zhi
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Guangyong
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.forename: Xiao
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.forename: Zhen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Beili
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ying
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhong
authors.forename: Yixue
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D006801:Humans; D010750:Phosphoproteins / Q000737:chemistry*; D010802:Phylogeny; D015398:Signal Transduction
chemical_list: D010750:Phosphoproteins