A computer-based bioinformatics method for identifying protein sequence differences between sets of sequences grouped into different phenotype data sets that involves querying a database to identify common sequence motifs within a first phenotype data set and another phenotype data set of protein sequences, computing a pairwise correlation among motifs for each data set, and computing the variation between the data sets to identify one or more motifs that are conserved in a given data set and thus correlate with that data set's phenotype.