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Role of Everlasting Triplet Expansions in Protein Evolution

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Abstract

Analysis of occurrence of simple amino acid repeats in large ensemble of prokaryotic and eukaryotic sequences reveals that nearly all amino acids found in the repeats belong to those which have in their codon repertoires aggressively expanding triplets, all of three known pathologically expanding classes GCU (GCU, CUG, UGC, AGC, GCA, CAG), GCC (GCC, CCG, CGC, GGC, GCG, CGG), and AAG (AAG, AGA, GAA, CTT, TTC, TCT). This is observed especially clear in the first exons of proteins of higher eukaryotes. The data are interpreted as manifestation of everlasting triplet expansions, which, presumably, started from the very origin of the triplet code. The spontaneous expansions continued to occur all the way during evolution, leaving their footprints in the protein-coding sequences as still visible simple amino acid repeats, as preferred triplets encoding the repeats, and as preferred codons in the codon usage tables.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grant 710/02-19.0 of the Israeli Science Foundation and by an EU grant QLG2-CT-2002-01298.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Genome Diversity Center, Institute of Evolution, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, 31905, Israel

    Zohar Koren & Edward N. Trifonov

  2. Department of Functional Genomics and Proteomics, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Kotlarska 2, 61137, Brno, Czech Republic

    Edward N. Trifonov

Authors
  1. Zohar Koren
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  2. Edward N. Trifonov
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Correspondence to Edward N. Trifonov.

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Koren, Z., Trifonov, E.N. Role of Everlasting Triplet Expansions in Protein Evolution. J Mol Evol 72, 232–239 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00239-010-9425-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00239-010-9425-0

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