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Nucleic Acids Research, 2002, Vol. 30, No. 5 1192-1197
© 2002 Oxford University Press

Regularities of context-dependent codon bias in eukaryotic genes

Alexei Fedorov*, Serge Saxonov and Walter Gilbert

Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

Nucleotides surrounding a codon influence the choice of this particular codon from among the group of possible synonymous codons. The strongest influence on codon usage arises from the nucleotide immediately following the codon and is known as the N1 context. We studied the relative abundance of codons with N1 contexts in genes from four eukaryotes for which the entire genomes have been sequenced: Homo sapiens, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans and Arabidopsis thaliana. For all the studied organisms it was found that 90% of the codons have a statistically significant N1 context-dependent codon bias. The relative abundance of each codon with an N1 context was compared with the relative abundance of the same 4mer oligonucleotide in the whole genome. This comparison showed that in about half of all cases the context-dependent codon bias could not be explained by the sequence composition of the genome. Ranking statistics were applied to compare context-dependent codon biases for codons from different synonymous groups. We found regularities in N1 context-dependent codon bias with respect to the codon nucleotide composition. Codons with the same nucleotides in the second and third positions and the same N1 context have a statistically significant correlation of their relative abundances.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 617 495 0560; Fax: +1 617 496 4313; Email: afedorov{at}fas.harvard.edu Present address:Serge Saxonov, Stanford Medical Informatics, 251 Campus Drive, Medical School Office Building X-215, Stanford, CA 94305, USA


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