Wilke Claus O, Drummond D Allan
Section of Integrative Biology and Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Texas, Austin 78712, USA.
Genetics. 2006 May;173(1):473-81. doi: 10.1534/genetics.105.051300. Epub 2006 Feb 19.
Recent work has shown that expression level is the main predictor of a gene's evolutionary rate and that more highly expressed genes evolve slower. A possible explanation for this observation is selection for proteins that fold properly despite mistranslation, in short selection for translational robustness. Translational robustness leads to the somewhat paradoxical prediction that highly expressed genes are extremely tolerant to missense substitutions but nevertheless evolve very slowly. Here, we study a simple theoretical model of translational robustness that allows us to gain analytic insight into how this paradoxical behavior arises.
近期研究表明,基因的表达水平是其进化速率的主要预测指标,且表达水平越高的基因进化得越慢。对此现象的一种可能解释是,选择那些尽管存在错译但仍能正确折叠的蛋白质,简而言之,就是选择翻译稳健性。翻译稳健性导致了一个看似矛盾的预测,即高表达基因对错义替换具有极强的耐受性,但进化却非常缓慢。在此,我们研究了一个关于翻译稳健性的简单理论模型,这使我们能够深入分析这种矛盾行为是如何产生的。