Professor Georgii Bazykin has co-authored a paper “Episodic evolution of coadapted sets of amino acid sites in mitochondrial proteins” that has been recently published in PLoS Genetics. The scientists have developed a phylogenetic approach for distinguishing pairs of amino acid sites that evolve concordantly, i.e., such that substitutions at one site trigger subsequent substitutions at the other; and the ones that evolve discordantly, so that substitutions at one site impede the subsequent substitutions at the other. Studying the mitochondrion-encoded proteins of metazoans and fungi, the researchers show that concordantly evolving sites are clustered in protein structures. Full text of the paper is available here.