Figure 1

Construction of CoSMoS. PSI-BLAST was used to identify homologues of E. coli K12 proteins in the RefSeq database (A). The PSI-BLAST output was parsed (B) and used to generate a fasta file for each individual E. coli protein containing the E. coli sequence itself and all homologous sequences (C). Fasta files were edited (D) to accommodate the MUSCLE alignment (E). Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSA) were then analyzed to extract amino acid (AA) conservation information (F) that was stored along with the according protein information in a MySQL database (G). The MySQL database can be queried using the web frontend [11] (H).