An Update of DIVERGE Software for Functional Divergence Analysis of Protein Family

DIVERGE is a software system for phylogeny-based analyses of protein family evolution and functional divergence. It provides a suite of statistical tools for selection and prioritization of the amino acid sites that are responsible for the functional divergence of a gene family. The synergistic efforts of DIVERGE and other methods have convincingly demonstrated that the pattern of rate change at a particular amino acid site may contain insightful information about the underlying functional divergence following gene duplication. These predicted sites may be used as candidates for further experiments. We are now releasing an updated version of DIVERGE with the following improvements: 1) a feasible approach to examining functional divergence in nearly complete sequences by including deletions and insertions (indels); 2) the calculation of the false discovery rate of functionally diverging sites; 3) estimation of the effective number of functional divergence-related sites that is reliable and insensitive to cutoffs; 4) a statistical test for asymmetric functional divergence; and 5) a new method to infer functional divergence specific to a given duplicate cluster. In addition, we have made efforts to improve software design and produce a well-written software manual for the general user.