Frequent GU wobble pairings reduce translation efficiency in Plasmodium falciparum.

ABSTRACT: Plasmodium falciparum genome has 81% A+T content. This nucleotide bias leads to extreme codon usage bias and culminates in frequent insertion of asparagine homorepeats in the proteome. Using recodonized GFP sequences, we show that codons decoded via G:U wobble pairing are suboptimal codons that are negatively associated to protein translation efficiency. Despite this, one third of all codons in the genome are GU wobble codons, suggesting that codon usage in P. falciparum has not been driven to maximize translation efficiency, but may have evolved as translational regulatory mechanism. Particularly, asparagine homorepeats are generally encoded by locally clustered GU wobble AAT codons, we demonstrated that this GU wobble-rich codon context is the determining factor that causes reduction of

SUBMITTER: Chan S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5429705 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature