Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Weill Cornell Medical College, Department of Genetic Medicine, New York, NY USA 10065; ²University of Louisville; Speed School of Engineering, Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Duthie Center Room 208, Louisville, KY USA 40292.

Email

Eric.rouchka@louisville.edu; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypthesis

Date

Received September 21, 2011; Accepted January 27, 2012; Published February 03, 2012

It has recently been demonstrated that human natural codon usage bias is optimized towards a higher buffering capacity to mutations (measured as the tendency of single point mutations in a DNA sequence to yield the same or similar amino acids) compared to random sequences. In this work, we investigate this phenomenon further by analyzing the natural DNA of four different species (human, mouse, zebrafish and fruit fly) to determine whether such a tolerance to mutations is correlated with the life span and age of sexual maturation for the corresponding organisms. We also propose a new measure to quantify the buffering capacity of a DNA sequence to mutations that takes into account the observed mutation rates within every genome and the effect of the corresponding mutation. Our results suggest there is a propensity for tolerance to mutations that is positively correlated with the life expectancy of the considered organisms. Moreover, random sequences that are constrained to produce the same protein as the naturally occurring sequences are found to be more buffered than completely random sequences while being less buffered than the natural sequences. These results suggest that optimization toward protective mechanisms tolerant to mutations is correlated with both life expectancy and age to sexual maturity at both the levels of codon usage bias and the bias of the natural sequence of codons itself.

Keywords

Buffering capacity, Codon bias, Sequence evolution

Citation

Mahdi & Rouchka, Bioinformation 8(3):158-162(2012)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.