Tip of the Week: PolyPhen
There are several methods that can be used to predict if a particular non-synonymous SNP is deleterious; SIFT and PolyPhen, among others. Which one to use will be up to the individual researcher and the strengths and weakness of the predictors, though the two mentioned do a pretty good job. Today’s tip will be on the web interface of PolyPhen 2 hosted at the Sunyaev lab*. Many tools and databases use PolyPhen to help predict the functional effect of a nonsynonymous SNP including PolyDoms, F-SNP (which I’ve done a tip on before), NIEHS SNPs and SeattleSNPs (which we have free tutorials on), SeattleSeq and more. Today’s tip will focus on simply using the web interface, but you can always download the program and integrate it as you see fit or use one of the databases. Along with SIFT, it’s arguably one of the most used predictors out there.
From an earlier help section describing PolyPhen:
PolyPhen (=Polymorphism Phenotyping) is an automatic tool for prediction of possible impact of an amino acid substitution on the structure and function of a human protein. This prediction is based on straightforward empirical rules which are applied to the sequence, phylogenetic and structural information characterizing the substitution
To learn more about how PolyPhen works, you can view that page, or you can read some of the references. Next tip I do (early February) will be on SIFT.
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Time February 9, 2011 at 2:45 PM
[...] Last tip I did was on PolyPhen, an algorithm that helps predict the phenotypic result of a non-synonymous SNP. There are other such algorithms available including MAPP (Multivariate Analaysis of Protein Polymorphism), SNPs3D and SIFT (Sorting Intolerant From Tolerant). It’s the latter that today’s tip will be briefly covering. [...]