Abstract
BackgroundTranslational selection is a ubiquitous and significant mechanism to regulate protein expression in prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes. Recent evidence has shown that translational selection is weakly operative in highly expressed genes in human and other vertebrates. However, it remains unclear whether translational selection acts differentially on human genes depending on their expression patterns.ResultsHere we report that human housekeeping (HK) genes that are strictly defined as genes that are expressed ubiquitously and consistently in most or all tissues, are under stronger translational selection.ConclusionsThese observations clearly show that translational selection is also closely associated with expression pattern. Our results suggest that human HK genes are more efficiently and/or accurately translated into proteins, which will inevitably open up a new understanding of HK genes and the regulation of gene expression.ReviewersThis article was reviewed by Yuan Yuan, Baylor College of Medicine; Han Liang, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (nominated by Dr Laura Landweber) Eugene Koonin, NCBI, NLM, NIH, United States of America Sandor Pongor, International Centre for Genetic Engineering and biotechnology (ICGEB), Italy.
Highlights
Translational selection is a ubiquitous and significant mechanism to regulate protein expression in prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes
Reviewers: This article was reviewed by Yuan Yuan, Baylor College of Medicine; Han Liang, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Eugene Koonin, NCBI, NLM, NIH, United States of America Sandor Pongor, International Centre for Genetic Engineering and biotechnology (ICGEB), Italy
We further classified genes into different groups according to their codon usage bias (CUB) values and demonstrated that the increase of gene expression level with CUB is more striking in expression-invariable genes (EIG) by comparison to expression-variable genes (EVG) and TS genes (Additional file 3: Figure S1)
Summary
Translational selection is a ubiquitous and significant mechanism to regulate protein expression in prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes. Recent evidence has shown that translational selection is weakly operative in highly expressed genes in human and other vertebrates. It remains unclear whether translational selection acts differentially on human genes depending on their expression patterns. Translational selection has been widely documented in prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes, as typified by Escherichia coli [19,20,21,22] and Saccharomyces cerevisiae [22,23,24] in which CUB correlates closely with gene expression level. Doherty and McInerney utilized the CDC index, and demonstrated that translational selection frequently overcomes genetic drift to operate weakly in human and other vertebrates [31], suggesting that translational selection is a widespread mechanism, not confined to prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes
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