Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT: Motivation
The protein-coding sequences of messenger RNAs are the linear template for translation of the gene sequence into protein. Nevertheless, the RNA can also form secondary structures by intramolecular base-pairing.Results
We show that the nucleotide distribution within codons is biased in all taxa of life on a global scale. Thereby, RNA secondary structures that require base-pairing between the position 1 of a codon with the position 1 of an opposing codon (here named RNA secondary structure class c1) are under-represented. We conclude that this bias may result from the co-evolution of codon sequence and mRNA secondary structure, suggesting that RNA secondary structures are generally important in protein-coding regions of mRNAs. The above result also implies that codon position 2 has a smaller influence on the amino acid choice than codon position 1.Supplementary information
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
SUBMITTER: Fricke M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7109657 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Fricke Markus M Gerst Ruman R Ibrahim Bashar B Niepmann Michael M Marz Manja M
Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) 20190201 4
<h4>Motivation</h4>The protein-coding sequences of messenger RNAs are the linear template for translation of the gene sequence into protein. Nevertheless, the RNA can also form secondary structures by intramolecular base-pairing.<h4>Results</h4>We show that the nucleotide distribution within codons is biased in all taxa of life on a global scale. Thereby, RNA secondary structures that require base-pairing between the position 1 of a codon with the position 1 of an opposing codon (here named RNA ...[more]