Xie T, Ding D
Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, Academia Sinica, People's Republic of China.
FEBS Lett. 1998 Aug 28;434(1-2):93-6. doi: 10.1016/s0014-5793(98)00955-7.
The hypothesis that synonymous codon usage is related to protein three-dimensional structure is examined by investigating the correlation between synonymous codon usage and protein secondary structure. All except two codons in E. coli show the same secondary structural preference for alpha-helix, beta-strand or coil as that of amino acids to be encoded by the respective codons, while 17 codons show secondary structural bias in mammalian proteins. The results indicate that there is no significant correlation between synonymous codon usage and protein secondary structure in E. coli, but there is a correlation in mammals. It could be deduced that synonymous codons carry much less structural information in prokaryotes than in eukaryotes due to their divergent evolutionary mechanism.
通过研究同义密码子使用与蛋白质二级结构之间的相关性，对同义密码子使用与蛋白质三维结构相关的假说进行了检验。大肠杆菌中除两个密码子外，其余所有密码子对α-螺旋、β-链或卷曲的二级结构偏好与各自密码子编码的氨基酸相同，而17个密码子在哺乳动物蛋白质中表现出二级结构偏向性。结果表明，同义密码子使用与大肠杆菌中的蛋白质二级结构之间没有显著相关性，但在哺乳动物中存在相关性。可以推断，由于原核生物和真核生物进化机制不同，同义密码子在原核生物中携带的结构信息比在真核生物中少得多。
