These symbols are used to indicate amino acids aligned at the sites marked with the symbol.
“” indicates perfect alignment.
“:” indicates a site belonging to group exhibiting strong similarity.
“.” indicates a site belonging to a group exhibiting weak similarity.
The criterion for distinguishing strong from weak similarity is as follows: Strong similarity corresponds to a PAM250 MATRIX score between amino acids of greater than 0.5, while weak similarity corresponds to a score of 0.5 or less. In the README excerpt, the lines horizontally adjacent to the phrases
STA
NEQK
:
indicate the amino-acid groups in cases for which the corresponding symbol is present (These are written using single-character notation for amino acids).
The README file included with the ClustalW source package contains the following text.
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12. The conservation line output in the clustal format alignment file has been changed.
Three characters are now used:
‘’ indicates positions which have a single, fully conserved residue
’:’ indicates that one of the following ‘strong’ groups is fully conserved:-
STA NEQK
NHQK
NDEQ
QHRK
MILV
MILF
HY
FYW
’.’ indicates that one of the following ‘weaker’ groups is fully conserved:-
CSA
ATV
SAG
STNK
STPA
SGND
SNDEQK
NDEQHK
NEQHRK
FVLIM
HFY
These are all the positively scoring groups that occur in the Gonnet Pam250
matrix. The strong and weak groups are defined as strong score >0.5 and weak
score =<0.5 respectively.
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