Comparison of Human and Mouse Pseudogenes

Abstract

Pseudogenes are formed by either gene duplication or retro transposition and yet unknown to express any RNA or produce any protein, which may be due to some defects in their structure. Because of the non-functional nature, pseudogenes are considered important resources in the study of evolutionary history and phylogenetic comparison of genomes. Psuedogenes whose structure is similar to the normal genes, pose problems in gene annotation and interfere with PCR or hybridization experiments. In this paper, we compare structural and functional properties of pseudogenes of human and mouse. It was found that 3,277 pseudogenes of humans which had conserved regions in pseudogenes of mouse shared the same number of chromosomes. Human and mouse pseudogenes are very similar to each other based on the effective codon usage and fraction of codons having guanine or cytosine at the third codon position. However, the proportion of GC content and lengths of base pairs were different. The parent genes or proteins which have more number of pseudogenes may be considered to be evolving more quickly showing more variability. Further ribosomal proteins, binding proteins and receptors had more number of pseudogenes than the other proteins