Aerobic prokaryotes do not have higher GC contents than anaerobic prokaryotes, but obligate aerobic prokaryotes have.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Among the four bases, guanine is the most susceptible to damage from oxidative stress. Replication of DNA containing damaged guanines results in G to T mutations. Therefore, the mutations resulting from oxidative DNA damage are generally expected to predominantly consist of G to T (and C to A when the damaged guanine is not in the reference strand) and result in decreased GC content. However, the opposite pattern was reported 16 years ago in a study of prokaryotic genomes. Although that result has been widely cited and confirmed by nine later studies with similar methods, the omission of the effect of shared ancestry requires a re-examination of the reliability of the results.

Results

When aerobic and obligate aerobic prokaryotes were mixed together and anaerobic

SUBMITTER: Aslam S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6350292 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature