MBE Advance Access originally published online on June 15, 2005
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2005 22(10):2022-2026; doi:10.1093/molbev/msi192
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Research Article |
A Dissection of Volatility in Yeast


* Section of Evolutionary Biology, Department Biology II, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Planegg-Martinsried, Germany; and
Centre for the Study of Evolution, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
E-mail: stoletzki{at}zi.biologie.uni-muenchen.de; a.c.eyre-walker{at}sussex.ac.uk.
It has been suggested that volatility, the proportion of mutations which change an amino acid, can be used to infer the level of natural selection acting upon a gene. This conjecture is supported by a correlation between volatility and the rate of nonsynonymous substitution (dN), or the ratio of nonsynonymous and synonymous substitution rates, in a variety of organisms. These organisms include yeast, in which the correlations are quite strong. Here we show that these correlations are a by-product of a correlation between synonymous codon bias toward translationally optimal codons and dN. Although this analysis suggests that volatility is not a good measure of the selection, we suggest that it might be possible to infer something about the level of natural selection, from a single genome sequence, using translational codon bias.
Key Words: volatility codon bias selection nonsynonymous substitution rate yeast
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