mutational bias and translational selection shaping the codon usage pattern of tissue-specific genes in rice突变的偏见和转化选择塑造组织基因的密码子使用模式在大米.pdfVIP

Mutational Bias and Translational Selection Shaping the Codon Usage Pattern of Tissue-Specific Genes in Rice Qingpo Liu* College of Agriculture and Food Science, Zhejiang A F University, Lin’an, People’s Republic of China Abstract The regulatory mechanisms of determining which genes specifically expressed in which tissues are still not fully elucidated, especially in plants. Using internal correspondence analysis, I first establish that tissue-specific genes exhibit significantly different synonymous codon usage in rice, although this effect is weak. The variability of synonymous codon usage between tissues accounts for 5.62% of the total codon usage variability, which has mainly arisen from the neutral evolutionary forces, such as GC content variation among tissues. Moreover, tissue-specific genes are under differential selective constraints, inferring that natural selection also contributes to the codon usage divergence between tissues. These findings may add further evidence in understanding the differentiation and regulation of tissue-specific gene products in plants. Citation: Liu Q (2012) Mutational Bias and Translational Selection Shaping the Codon Usage Pattern of Tissue-Specific Genes in Rice. PLoS ONE 7(10): e48295. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0048295 Editor: Marc Robinson-Rechavi, University of Lausanne, Switzerland Received June 25, 2012; Accepted September 24, 2012; Published October 29, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Qingpo Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was financially supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China , Zhejiang P