A Universal Trend of Reduced mRNA Stability near the Translation-Initiation Site in Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes
By W. Gu, Tong Zhou, Claus O. Wilke. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2010
336 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent studies have suggested that the thermodynamic stability of mRNA secondary structure near the start codon can regulate translation efficiency in Escherichia coli, and that translation is more efficient the less stable the secondary structure. We survey the complete genomes of 340 species for signals of reduced mRNA secondary structure near the start codon. Our analysis includes bacteria, archaea, fungi, plants, insects, fishes, birds, and mammals. We find that nearly all species show evidence for reduced mRNA stability near the start codon. The reduction in stability generally increases with increasing genomic GC content. In prokaryotes, the reduction also increases with decreasing optimal growth temperature. Within genomes, there is variation in the stability among genes, and this variation correlates with gene GC content, codon bias, and gene expression level. For birds and mammals, however, we do not find a genome-wide trend of reduced mRNA stability near the start codon. Yet the most GC rich genes in these organisms do show such a signal. We conclude that reduced stability of the mRNA secondary structure near the start codon is a universal feature of all cellular life. We suggest that the origin of this reduction is selection for efficient recognition of the start codon by initiator-tRNA.
Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9c4f677506f3521ccdd4dae15bab1734dabda3e
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In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- Sequence signatures and mRNA concentration can explain two-thirds of protein abundance variation in a human cell line (2010, background): “Recent work in Escherichia coli and yeast confirms the function of secondary structures in protein expression regulation, in particular in the 50 end of the mRNA (Ringner and Krogh, 2005; Kudla et al, 2009; Gu et al, 2010; Tuller et al, 2010).”
- Understanding the contribution of synonymous mutations to human disease (2011, background): “A plausible explanation for decreased protein levels accompanying more stable mRNA structures is provided by studies on mRNA structural stability and translation initiatio”