Publications by authors named "Lu-Yun Wu"
Because of the limited effectiveness of prevailing phylogenetic methods when applied to highly divergent protein sequences, the phylogenetic analysis problem remains challenging. Here, we propose a sequence-based evolutionary distance algorithm termed sequence distance (SD), which innovatively incorporates site-to-site correlation within protein sequences into the distance estimation. In protein superfamilies, SD can effectively distinguish evolutionary relationships both within and between protein families, producing phylogenetic trees that closely align with those based on structural information, even with sequence identity less than 20%.
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- Protein thermostability is gaining interest, but its mechanisms differ across protein families; this study focuses on the serine hydroxymethyltransferase (SHMT) family.
- Using multivariate statistical analysis and principal component analysis, researchers identified three key amino acid fragments that influence thermostability and found significant correlations between these fragments and thermal resistance.
- The study highlights specific amino acid positions important for stability, with thermophilic SHMTs showing notable insertions or deletions in the C-terminal domain, offering a method to explore determinants in other protein families.