Protein co-evolution and interactions

The co-evolutive landmarks left by the evolutionary process in protein multiple sequence alignments can be used, among other things, to detect pairs of proteins physically interacting or functionally related. Over time, we have developed different approaches that exploit this idea with the aim of extracting protein interaction networks from the deluge of sequence data that characterizes modern Biology. Current “high-throughput sequencing” technologies have the potential to revolutionize these methods as they generate protein sequences in a fast and cheap way. Nevertheless, more than blindly using all available sequences, it looks like the future will be characterized by a careful selection of those to use, and even the “a-la-carte” re-sequencing of the more suitable species/strains for a particular family/system of interest.