Abstract
A method of formal analysis of homologous protein sequences is developed. Structural aspects of the problem are emphasized and not the phylogenetic ones. A special mathematical treatment of the redundancy of comparisons within a set of homologous sequences is given. This treatment permits us to obtain statistically significant results with the actually available experimental information. The method is applied to the study of tandem amino acid substitutions in mitochondrial cytochromes c. It is shown that adjacent substitutions are significantly more frequent than expected assuming that substitutions are mutually independent. This latter independence is roughly verified for more distant substitutions. A tentative genetic mechanism that could lead to such an effect is proposed.
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