Zhang Yong, Zhang Zhihua, Ling Lunjiang, Shi Baochen, Chen Runsheng
Bioinformatics Laboratory, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
Bioinformatics. 2004 Mar 22;20(5):599-603. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btg457. Epub 2004 Jan 22.
Small RNA (sRNA) genes in Escherichia coli have been in focus recently, as 44 out of 55 experimentally confirmed sRNA genes have been precisely located in the genome. The object of this study is to analyze quantitatively the conservation of these sRNA genes and compare it with the conservation of protein-encoding genes, function-unknown regions and tRNA genes.
The results show that within an evolutionary distance of 0.26, both sRNA genes and protein-encoding genes display a similar tendency in their degrees of conservation at the nucleotide level. In addition, the conservation of sRNA genes is much stronger than function-unknown regions, but much weaker than tRNA genes. Based on the conservation of studied sRNA genes, we also give clues to estimate the total number of sRNA genes in E.coli.
Supplementary information is available at http://www.bioinfo.org.cn/SM/sRNAconservation.htm
最近，大肠杆菌中的小RNA（sRNA）基因受到了关注，因为在55个经实验确认的sRNA基因中，有44个已在基因组中精确定位。本研究的目的是定量分析这些sRNA基因的保守性，并将其与蛋白质编码基因、功能未知区域和tRNA基因的保守性进行比较。
结果表明，在进化距离为0.26以内，sRNA基因和蛋白质编码基因在核苷酸水平上的保守程度呈现出相似的趋势。此外，sRNA基因的保守性比功能未知区域强得多，但比tRNA基因弱得多。基于所研究sRNA基因的保守性，我们还给出了估计大肠杆菌中sRNA基因总数的线索。
