Translation-coupled violation of Parity Rule 2 in human genes is not the cause of heterogeneity of the DNA G+C content of third codon position.

Abstract

The genome of higher eukaryotes consists of genes having a widely heterogeneous base composition at the third codon position. Ubiquitous variability of the DNA base composition has the following two aspects: intragenomic heterogeneity of the G+C content and the amino-acid-specific translation-coupled biases from the Parity Rule 2 (PR2). PR2 is an intrastrand rule where A = T and G = C are expected if there is no bias in mutation and selection between the two complementary strands of DNA. To examine whether or not the biases from PR2 are responsible for the wide heterogeneity of the DNA G+C content in human, the third codon position of 846 human genes was analyzed. Genes were separated into six groups according to their G+C content of the third codon position, and each group was examined for the translation-coupled PR2 biases in the nucleotide composition of the third codon position for two- and four-codon amino acids. The results show that genes in the different G+C content groups have similar PR2 biases, indicating that the intragenomic heterogeneity of the G+C content is not correlated with translation-coupled biases from the PR2. Therefore, the heterogeneity of the G+C content is likely to be determined by some other mechanism (e.g. locally variable directional mutation pressures) than amino-acid-specific selections for the codon preference.