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MBE Advance Access originally published online on February 20, 2009
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2009 26(5):1155-1161; doi:10.1093/molbev/msp031
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Research Articles

Solvent Exposure Imparts Similar Selective Pressures across a Range of Yeast Proteins

Gavin C. Conant* and Peter F. Stadler{dagger},{ddagger},§,||

* Division of Animal Sciences and Informatics Institute, University of Missouri-Columbia
{dagger} Bioinformatics Group, Department of Computer Science and Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
{ddagger} RNomics Group, Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology, Leipzig, Germany
§ Institute for Theoretical Chemistry, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
|| Santa Fe Institute

E-mail: conantg{at}missouri.edu.

Accepted for publication February 16, 2009.

We study how an amino acid residue's solvent exposure influences its propensity for substitution by analyzing multiple alignments of 61 yeast genes for which the crystal structure is known. We find that the selective constraint on the interior residues is on average 10 times that of residues on the surface. Surprisingly, there is no correlation between the overall selective constraint observed for a protein alignment and the ratio of constraints on interior and surface residues. By modeling the selective constraint on several amino acid properties, we show that although residue volume and hydropathy are strongly conserved across most alignments, there is little variation in interior versus surface conservation for these two properties. By contrast, residue charge (isoelectric point) is less generally conserved when considering the protein as a whole but shows a strong constraint against the introduction of charged residues into the protein interior.

Key Words: amino acid substitution • evolutionary models • protein structure

Jeffrey Thorne, Associate Editor


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 Mol Biol EvolHome page
E. A. Franzosa and Y. Xia
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[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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