Relative von Neumann entropy for evaluating amino acid conservation.

The Shannon entropy is a common way of measuring conservation of sites in multiple sequence alignments, and has also been extended with the relative Shannon entropy to account for background frequencies. The von Neumann entropy is another extension of the Shannon entropy, adapted from quantum mechanics in order to account for amino acid similarities. However, there is yet no relative von Neumann entropy defined for sequence analysis. We introduce a new definition of the von Neumann entropy for use in sequence analysis, which we found to perform better than the previous definition. We also introduce the relative von Neumann entropy and a way of parametrizing this in order to obtain the Shannon entropy, the relative Shannon entropy and the von Neumann entropy at special parameter values. We performed an exhaustive search of this parameter space and found better predictions of catalytic sites compared to any of the previously used entropies.