+<head><title>Alignment Conservation Annotation</title></head>
+<body><p><strong>Alignment Conservation Annotation</strong></p>
+<p>This is an automatically calculated quantitative alignment
+annotation which measures the number of conserved physico-chemical
+properties conserved for each column of the alignment. Its calculation
+is based on the one used in
+ the AMAS method of multiple sequence alignment analysis :<br>
+<ul>Livingstone
+ C.D. and Barton G.J. (1993), Protein Sequence Alignments: A Strategy
+ for the Hierarchical Analysis of Residue Conservation.<em>CABIOS</em> Vol. <b>9</b>
+ No. 6 (745-756)).
+</ul>
+<em><a href="http://www.compbio.dundee.ac.uk/papers/amas/amas3d.html">View an HTML version of the paper</a></em>
+</p>
+<p>Conservation is measured as a numerical index reflecting the conservation of
+ <a href="../misc/aaproperties.html">physico-chemical
+ properties</a> in the alignment: Identities score highest, and the next most
+ conserved group contain substitutions to amino acids lying in the same physico-chemical
+ class.</p>
+ <p>Conservation is visualised on the alignment or a sequence group
+ as a histogram giving the score for each column. Conserved columns are
+ indicated by '*' (score of 11 with default amino acid property
+ grouping), and columns with mutations where all properties are
+ conserved are marked with a '+' (score of 10, indicating all
+ properties are conserved).</p>
+
+ <p><em>Colouring an alignment by conservation</em><br>
+Conservation scores can be used to colour an alignment. This is
+explained further in the help page for <a
+href="../colourSchemes/conservation.html">conservation colouring</a>.
+</p>
+</body>
+</html>