Signatures of optimal codon usage in metabolic genes inform budding yeast ecology.

ABSTRACT: Reverse ecology is the inference of ecological information from patterns of genomic variation. One rich, heretofore underutilized, source of ecologically relevant genomic information is codon optimality or adaptation. Bias toward codons that match the tRNA pool is robustly associated with high gene expression in diverse organisms, suggesting that codon optimization could be used in a reverse ecology framework to identify highly expressed, ecologically relevant genes. To test this hypothesis, we examined the relationship between optimal codon usage in the classic galactose metabolism (GAL) pathway and known ecological niches for 329 species of budding yeasts, a diverse subphylum of fungi. We find that optimal codon usage in the GAL pathway is positively correlated with quantitative growth o

SUBMITTER: LaBella AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8084343 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature