Originally published as Genetics Published Articles Ahead of Print on February 19, 2006.

Genetics, Vol. 173, 473-481, May 2006, Copyright © 2006
doi:10.1534/genetics.105.051300

Population Genetics of Translational Robustness

* Section of Integrative Biology and Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712 and {dagger} Program in Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125

1 Corresponding author: Integrative Biology, University of Texas, 1 University Station—C0930, Austin, TX 78712.
E-mail: cwilke{at}mail.utexas.edu

Recent work has shown that expression level is the main predictor of a gene's evolutionary rate and that more highly expressed genes evolve slower. A possible explanation for this observation is selection for proteins that fold properly despite mistranslation, in short selection for translational robustness. Translational robustness leads to the somewhat paradoxical prediction that highly expressed genes are extremely tolerant to missense substitutions but nevertheless evolve very slowly. Here, we study a simple theoretical model of translational robustness that allows us to gain analytic insight into how this paradoxical behavior arises.




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