Statistical and Information-Theoretic Exploration of Amino Acid Sequence Relationships with Higher-Order Levels of Protein Description

Understanding the relationship of amino acid sequences, their divergence in evolution and their patterns of conservation across varying structural levels (secondary, super-secondary and tertiary structures of proteins) provide useful clues about how protein shapes come about, how they function and how they evolve, with the potential to inform new directions in protein studies. This thesis is the culmination of a set of formal statistical and information theoretic explorations that aim to increase our understanding of the specific relationships and constraints imposed by the amino acid sequence of proteins when compared to their higher-order structures.