Identifying functional divergence has been a daunting task for next generation sequencing scientists. Very less attention has been paid to variation caused as a result of single nucleotide polymorphisms and indels on functions of proteins, particularly in bacterial genomes.
Wheeler N.E. et.al. (2016) in their recent research article have proposed a hidden markov model technique to calculate the amino acid divergence which will have impact on protein functions. They have applied this technique on the protein sequences of bacterium Salmonella enterica. They call this approach Delta Bit score or DBS.
A program for DBS implementation has been constructed and it is freely available at the following website : https://github.com/UCanCompBio/deltaBS
Reference:
Wheeler N.E. et al.(2016) A profile based method for identifying functional divergence of orthologous genes in bacterial genomes.Bioinformatics 32(23) 3566-3574.