MBE Advance Access published online on August 4, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msl081
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1 Division of Matrix Biology, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Karolinska Institutet, SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden; Stockholm Bioinformatics Center, SCFAB, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Some proteins are highly conserved across all species while others diverge significantly even between closely related species. Attempts have been made to correlate the rate of protein evolution to amino acid composition, protein dispensability and the number of protein-protein interactions, but in all cases conflicting studies have shown that the theories are hard to confirm experimentally. The only correlation that is undisputed so far is that highly/broadly expressed proteins seem to evolve at a lower rate. Consequently, it has been suggested that correlations between evolution rate and factors like protein dispensability or the number of protein-protein interactions could be just secondary effects due to differences in expression. The purpose of this study was to analyze mammalian proteins/genes with known subcellular location for variations in evolution rates. We show that proteins that are exported (extracellular proteins) evolve faster than proteins that reside inside the cell (intracellular proteins). We find weak, but significant, correlations between evolution rates and expression levels, percentage of tissues in which the proteins are expressed (expression broadness) and the number of protein interaction partners. More important, we show that the observed difference in evolution rate between extra- and intracellular proteins is largely independent of expression levels, expression broadness and the number of protein-protein interactions. We also find that the difference is not caused by an over-representation of immunological proteins or disulfide bridge-containing proteins among the extracellular data set. We conclude that the subcellular location of a mammalian protein has a larger effect on its evolution rate than any of the other factors studied in this paper, including expression levels/patterns. We observe a difference in evolution rates between extracellular and intracellular proteins for a yeast data set as well and again show that it is completely independent of expression levels.
Accepted July 31, 2006
Research Article
Protein Evolution is Faster Outside the Cell
Karin Julenius 1 * and Anders Gorm Pedersen 2
2 Center for Biological Sequence Analysis, BioCentrum-DTU, Technical University of Denmark, Building 208, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark
Karin Julenius, E-mail: karinjul{at}sbc.su.se
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