Exonic splice regulation imposes strong selection at synonymous sites.

ABSTRACT: What proportion of coding sequence nucleotides have roles in splicing, and how strong is the selection that maintains them? Despite a large body of research into exonic splice regulatory signals, these questions have not been answered. This is because, to our knowledge, previous investigations have not explicitly disentangled the frequency of splice regulatory elements from the strength of the evolutionary constraint under which they evolve. Current data are consistent both with a scenario of weak and diffuse constraint, enveloping large swaths of sequence, as well as with well-defined pockets of strong purifying selection. In the former case, natural selection on exonic splice enhancers (ESEs) might primarily act as a slight modifier of codon usage bias. In the latter, mutations that disr

SUBMITTER: Savisaar R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6169883 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature