Compensatory Evolution of Intrinsic Transcription Terminators in Bacillus Cereus.

ABSTRACT: Many RNA molecules possess complicated secondary structure critical to their function. Mutations in double-helical regions of RNA may disrupt Watson-Crick (WC) interactions causing structure destabilization or even complete loss of function. Such disruption can be compensated by another mutation restoring base pairing, as has been shown for mRNA, rRNA and tRNA. Here, we investigate the evolution of intrinsic transcription terminators between closely related strains of Bacillus cereus. While the terminator structure is maintained by strong natural selection, as evidenced by the low frequency of disrupting mutations, we observe multiple instances of pairs of disrupting-compensating mutations in RNA structure stems. Such two-step switches between different WC pairs occur very fast, consistent

SUBMITTER: Safina KR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5381666 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature