Eck Institute for Global Health, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, IN, USA.
Infect Genet Evol. 2012 Oct;12(7):1535-42. doi: 10.1016/j.meegid.2012.06.005. Epub 2012 Jun 15.
The biased usage of synonymous codons affects translational efficiency of genes. We studied codon usage patterns of genes that are perfectly conserved at the amino acid level among three important mosquito vector species: Aedes aegypti (vector of dengue virus), Anopheles gambiae (vector of malaria) and Culex quinquefasciatus (vector of lymphatic filariasis and West Nile Virus). Although these proteins have the same amino acid sequences, non-random usage of synonymous codons is evident among the orthologous genes. The coding sequences of these genes were simulated to generate random mutation sites to be further investigated for patterns of codon bias. It was found that codon usage bias is significantly higher in genes that represented perfectly conserved proteins than genes where variation was apparent at the amino acid sequence. Our results suggest that genes coding for perfectly conserved proteins are highly biased with optimized codons and may be under stringent translational selection in these vector species.
同义密码子的偏倚使用会影响基因的翻译效率。我们研究了在三种重要的蚊媒物种（登革热病毒的传播媒介埃及伊蚊、疟疾的传播媒介冈比亚按蚊和淋巴丝虫病和西尼罗河病毒的传播媒介致倦库蚊）中氨基酸水平完全保守的基因的密码子使用模式。尽管这些蛋白质具有相同的氨基酸序列，但在这些直系同源基因中，同义密码子的非随机使用是显而易见的。模拟这些基因的编码序列以产生随机突变位点，以进一步研究密码子偏好模式。结果发现，在代表完全保守蛋白质的基因中，密码子使用偏好性明显高于氨基酸序列明显变化的基因。我们的结果表明，编码完全保守蛋白质的基因具有高度偏倚的优化密码子，并且在这些蚊媒物种中可能受到严格的翻译选择。
