Highly expressed and slowly evolving proteins share compositional properties with thermophilic proteins.

ABSTRACT: The sequences of proteins encoded by a genome evolve at different rates. A correlate of a protein's evolutionary rate is its expression level: highly expressed proteins tend to evolve slowly. Some explanations of rate variation and the correlation between rate and expression predict that more slowly evolving and more highly expressed proteins have more favorable equilibrium constants for folding. Proteins from thermophiles generally have more stable folds than proteins from mesophiles, and it is known that there are systematic differences in amino acid content between thermophilic and mesophilic proteins. I examined whether there are analogous correlations of amino acid frequencies with evolutionary rate and expression level within genomes. In most of the organisms analyzed, there is a str

SUBMITTER: Cherry JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2822289 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature