Keram: a novel stand-alone application for correlated mutations identification and analysis

Keram is a stand-alone Windows 2000/XP/Vista application designed for the detection and analysis of the correlated mutations. Study of this phenomenon provides important information about protein structure stability factors as well as the formation of protein complexes. It is generally assumed that the mechanism of compensation explains the mutations that occur simultaneously. Keram is designed to detect the mutational correlations by comparative analysis of multiple sequence alignments. Additionally a three dimensional structure can be applied to calculate the distance between correlated positions in the protein molecule. Keram has been succesfully applied for the analysis of kinase subfamilies. The obtained data suggest that the mechanism of compensation does not explain utterly this phenomenon which seems to be much more complex and diverse. The residues that are detected as correlated are often placed at very distant positions of the protein structure, therefore the direct mutual interaction between them is impossible. We have detected not only correlated pairs, but also clusters of positions (even more than 10) that reveal correlated changeability.