Document Type

Article

Original Publication Date

2010

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology

Volume

2010

DOI of Original Publication

10.1155/2010/202918

Comments

Originally published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2010/202918

Date of Submission

August 2014

Abstract

Features of amino-acid and codon changes can provide us important insights on protein evolution. So far, investigators have often examined mutation patterns at either interspecies fixed substitution or intraspecies nucleotide polymorphism level, but not both. Here, we performed a unique analysis of a combined set of intra-species polymorphisms and inter-species substitutions in human codons. Strong difference in mutational pattern was found at codon positions 1, 2, and 3 between the polymorphism and fixation data. Fixation had strong bias towards increasing the rarest codons but decreasing the most frequently used codons, suggesting that codon equilibrium has not been reached yet. We detected strong CpG effect on CG-containing codons and subsequent suppression by fixation. Finally, we detected the signature of purifying selection against A∣U dinucleotides at synonymous dicodon boundaries. Overall, fixation process could effectively and quickly correct the volatile changes introduced by polymorphisms so that codon changes could be gradual and directional and that codon composition could be kept relatively stable during evolution.

Rights

Copyright © 2010 Zhongming Zhao and Cizhong Jiang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Is Part Of

VCU Psychiatry Publications

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