Abstract

Ancestral sequence reconstruction is a technique that is gaining widespread use in molecular evolution studies and protein engineering. Accurate reconstruction requires the ability to handle appropriately large numbers of sequences, as well as insertion and deletion (indel) events, but available approaches exhibit limitations. To address these limitations, we developed Graphical Representation of Ancestral Sequence Predictions (GRASP), which efficiently implements maximum likelihood methods to enable the inference of ancestors of families with more than 10,000 members. GRASP implements partial order graphs (POGs) to represent and infer insertion and deletion events across ancestors, enabling the identification of building blocks for protein engineering.

Publication
PLOS Computational Biology
Inference