Independence divergence-generated binary trees of amino acids.

The discovery of the relationship between amino acids is important in terms of the replacement ability, as used in protein engineering homology studies, and gaining a better understanding of the roles which various properties of the residues play in the creation of a unique, stable, 3-D protein structure. Amino acid sequences of proteins edited by evolution are anything but random. The measure of nonrandomness, i.e. the level of editing, can be characterized by an independence divergence value. This parameter is used to generate binary tree relationships between amino acids. The relationships of residues presented in this paper are based on protein building features and not on the physico-chemical characteristics of amino acids. This approach is not biased by the tautology present in all sequence similarity-based relationship studies. The roles which various physico-chemical characteristics play in the determination of the relationships between amino acids are also discussed.