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MBE Advance Access originally published online on June 30, 2009
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2009 26(10):2171-2173; doi:10.1093/molbev/msp132
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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

Letters

The Consequences of Base Pair Composition Biases for Regulatory Network Organization in Prokaryotes

Otto X. Cordero* and Paulien Hogeweg

* Theoretical Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Utrecht,Utrecht, The Netherlands

Email: ottoxcordero{at}gmail.com.

Accepted for publication June 23, 2009.

Given the dramatic variation in guanine-cytosine (GC) content observed in prokaryotes, from ~20% to ~75% GC, one wonders if these extreme biases in base pair composition affect the evolution of transcription factor–binding sites (BS). This letter shows that, along the wide range of GC content variation in bacteria, bacterial BS keep a high frequency of AT bases, roughly independently of the background (BG) base pair composition of intergenic regions. As a result, the equilibrium base pair frequencies of BS depart the most from those of BS DNA in GC-rich genomes. This not only implies a higher specificity but also a higher coding barrier for BS in GC-rich genomes. In accordance, we observe that the average percentage of divergently transcribed regions increases with the GC content of the genome, suggesting the use of a more efficient coding strategy.

Key Words: evolution • gene regulation • GC content • binding sites

Michele Vendruscolo, Associate Editor


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