The causes of protein evolutionary rate variation.

The rate of protein evolution varies more than 1000-fold and, for the past 30 years, it was thought that the rate was determined by protein function. Drummond and co-workers have now shown that a single factor underlying mRNA expression, protein abundance and synonymous codon usage is the chief causal agent of protein evolutionary rate in yeast. It will be interesting to see whether this is shown to be a universal rule for all biological systems.

[1]  Michael R. Green,et al.  Dissecting the Regulatory Circuitry of a Eukaryotic Genome , 1998, Cell.

[2]  P. Sharp,et al.  The codon Adaptation Index--a measure of directional synonymous codon usage bias, and its potential applications. , 1987, Nucleic acids research.

[3]  J O McInerney,et al.  Replicational and transcriptional selection on codon usage in Borrelia burgdorferi. , 1998, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[4]  C. Wilke,et al.  A single determinant dominates the rate of yeast protein evolution. , 2006, Molecular biology and evolution.

[5]  C. Wilke,et al.  Why highly expressed proteins evolve slowly. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[6]  J. Mandel.  Use of the Singular Value Decomposition in Regression Analysis , 1982 .

[7]  M. Gouy,et al.  Codon usage in bacteria: correlation with gene expressivity. , 1982, Nucleic acids research.

[8]  Hiroshi Akashi,et al.  Translational selection and yeast proteome evolution. , 2003, Genetics.

[9]  A. E. Hirsh,et al.  Protein dispensability and rate of evolution , 2001, Nature.

[10]  E. O’Shea,et al.  Global analysis of protein expression in yeast , 2003, Nature.

[11]  Christine M. Malcom,et al.  A highly unexpected strong correlation between fixation probability of nonsynonymous mutations and mutation rate. , 2005, Trends in genetics : TIG.

[12]  Laurent Duret,et al.  Synonymous Codon Usage, Accuracy of Translation, and Gene Length in Caenorhabditis elegans , 2001, Journal of Molecular Evolution.

[13]  A. E. Hirsh,et al.  Functional genomic analysis of the rates of protein evolution. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[14]  A. E. Hirsh,et al.  Evolutionary Rate in the Protein Interaction Network , 2002, Science.

[15]  C. Pál,et al.  Highly expressed genes in yeast evolve slowly. , 2001, Genetics.