❓Why do we calculate the conservation degree of each residue❓

The conservation degree describes the natural trend for a residue to either mutate or be conserved in a protein during evolution in different species. Usually, highly conserved residues can contribute to protein-protein complex stability and indicate folding core. Also, evolutionary conserved residues indicate the entropy at the position which reflects local flexibility of the protein.

The tool to illustrate conservation degree is ConSurf which compares query sequence with its homologous, using multiple sequence alignment. The position specific rates are normalized into nine grades from 1-9; where 9 indicates highly-conserved residues, while 1 indicates a rapidly altered position.