Genetics. Published Articles Ahead of Print: December 15, 2005, Copyright © 2005
doi:10.1534/genetics.105.047399


A more recent version of this article appeared on March 1, 2006.


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Evolutionary rates and expression level in Chlamydomonas

1 Dalhousie University

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: robert.lee{at}dal.ca.

Submitted on June 30, 2005
Revised on September 29, 2005
Accepted on 22 November 2005


Abstract

In many biological systems, especially bacteria and unicellular eukaryotes, rates of synonymous and nonsynonymous nucleotide divergence are negatively correlated with the level of gene expression, a phenomenon that has been attributed to natural selection. Surprisingly, this relationship has not been examined in many important groups, including the unicellular model organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Prior to this study, comparative data on protein-coding sequences from C. reinhardtii and its close non-interfertile relative C. incerta was very limited. We compiled and analyzed protein-coding sequences for 67 nuclear genes from these taxa; the sequences were mostly obtained from the C. reinhardtii EST database and our C. incerta EST data. Compositional and synonymous codon usage biases varied among genes within each species but were highly correlated between the orthologous genes of the two species. Relative rates of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitution across genes varied widely and showed a strong negative correlation with the level of gene expression as estimated by the codon adaptation index. Our comparative analysis of substitution rates in introns of lowly and highly expressed genes suggests that natural selection has a larger contribution than mutation to the observed correlation between evolutionary rates and gene expression level in Chlamydomonas.

Key Words: codon bias, green algae, introns, synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions, translational selection




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