Do universal codon-usage patterns minimize the effects of mutation and translation error?

ABSTRACT:

Background

Do species use codons that reduce the impact of errors in translation or replication? The genetic code is arranged in a way that minimizes errors, defined as the sum of the differences in amino-acid properties caused by single-base changes from each codon to each other codon. However, the extent to which organisms optimize the genetic messages written in this code has been far less studied. We tested whether codon and amino-acid usages from 457 bacteria, 264 eukaryotes, and 33 archaea minimize errors compared to random usages, and whether changes in genome G+C content influence these error values.

Results

We tested the hypotheses that organisms choose their codon usage to minimize errors, and that the large observed variation in G+C content in coding sequences, bu

SUBMITTER: Marquez R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1297647 | biostudies-literature | 2005

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature