Search results for "codon usage"
showing 6 items of 16 documents
Iron in Translation: From the Beginning to the End
2021
Iron is an essential element for all eukaryotes, since it acts as a cofactor for many enzymes involved in basic cellular functions, including translation. While the mammalian iron-regulatory protein/iron-responsive element (IRP/IRE) system arose as one of the first examples of translational regulation in higher eukaryotes, little is known about the contribution of iron itself to the different stages of eukaryotic translation. In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, iron deficiency provokes a global impairment of translation at the initiation step, which is mediated by the Gcn2-eIF2α pathway, while the post-transcriptional regulator Cth2 specifically represses the translation of a subgroup of…
Reliability of mitochondrial DNA in an acanthocephalan: The problem of pseudogenes
2006
The utility of mitochondrial DNA as a molecular marker for evolutionary studies is well recognized. However, several problems can arise when using mitochondrial DNA, one of which is the presence of nuclear mitochondrial pseudogenes, or Numts. Pseudogenes of cytochrome oxidase I were preferentially amplified from Acanthocephalus lucii (Acanthocephala) using a universal PCR approach. To verify the presence and abundance of pseudogenes, length heterogeneity analysis of the PCR fragments was performed. PCR products obtained with universal primers often contained fragments of different sizes. Cloned sequences from universal PCR products nearly always contained sequence abnormalities such as inde…
Glutamine Codon Usage and polyQ Evolution in Primates Depend on the Q Stretch Length
2018
Abstract Amino acid usage in a proteome depends mostly on its taxonomy, as it does the codon usage in transcriptomes. Here, we explore the level of variation in the codon usage of a specific amino acid, glutamine, in relation to the number of consecutive glutamine residues. We show that CAG triplets are consistently more abundant in short glutamine homorepeats (polyQ, four to eight residues) than in shorter glutamine stretches (one to three residues), leading to the evolutionary growth of the repeat region in a CAG-dependent manner. The length of orthologous polyQ regions is mostly stable in primates, particularly the short ones. Interestingly, given a short polyQ the CAG usage is higher in…
A sequence motif enriched in regions bound by the Drosophila dosage compensation complex
2010
Abstract Background In Drosophila melanogaster, dosage compensation is mediated by the action of the dosage compensation complex (DCC). How the DCC recognizes the fly X chromosome is still poorly understood. Characteristic sequence signatures at all DCC binding sites have not hitherto been found. Results In this study, we compare the known binding sites of the DCC with oligonucleotide profiles that measure the specificity of the sequences of the D. melanogaster X chromosome. We show that the X chromosome regions bound by the DCC are enriched for a particular type of short, repetitive sequences. Their distribution suggests that these sequences contribute to chromosome recognition, the genera…
The importance of definitions in the study of polyQ regions: A tale of thresholds, impurities and sequence context
2020
Graphical abstract
Blueprint for a minimal photoautotrophic cell: conserved and variable genes in Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942.
2011
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.-- et al.