Preventing dangerous nonsense: selection for robustness to transcriptional error in human genes.

ABSTRACT: Nonsense Mediated Decay (NMD) degrades transcripts that contain a premature STOP codon resulting from mistranscription or missplicing. However NMD's surveillance of gene expression varies in efficiency both among and within human genes. Previous work has shown that the intron content of human genes is influenced by missplicing events invisible to NMD. Given the high rate of transcriptional errors in eukaryotes, we hypothesized that natural selection has promoted a dual strategy of "prevention and cure" to alleviate the problem of nonsense transcriptional errors. A prediction of this hypothesis is that NMD's inefficiency should leave a signature of "transcriptional robustness" in human gene sequences that reduces the frequency of nonsense transcriptional errors. For human genes we determine

SUBMITTER: Cusack BP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3192821 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature