Figure 4

Genetic conservation measures. Conservation statistics are useful to evaluate single sequences and extract knowledge from the combined pool of available data. Incomplete sequences have to be discarded at least partially for results to reflect true polymorphic variations exclusively; the following plots do not include non-strict data. (a) The sequential conservation profile of the alignment indicates regions and positions of special interest. (b) When this profile is transformed into the conservation frequency histogram, some global trends become apparent. Blue dots are used for α ≥ 0.99, green dots for 0.95 ≤ α < 0.99, and red dots for α < 0.95. Note that under these thresholds, the great majority of mutations affects conserved positions: P(α < 0.95) = 0.570%, P(α < 0.99) = 2.905%. In view of these extreme levels of conservation, it may be interesting to tune α to adjust the significance of "high" conservation levels to the raw amounts of closely related data.