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Protein structural phylogenetics

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Protein structural phylogenetics (or Structural phylogenetics) is the branch of molecular evolution that incorporates three dimensional information from protein structure to understand phylogenetic relationships, and translates those evolutionary insights into understanding protein structure and function. Protein structures are robust over long evolutionary time scales compared with amino acid sequence. The number of protein sequences that can fold into a given structure is astronomical, with one study estimating even a small protein structure with fewer than 100 amino acids can be attained by a number of sequences that exceeds the Avogadro constant. These properties make structures useful for understanding deep evolutionary relationships, where sequences have become saturated with mutations and share very low levels of similarity.