Journal
JOURNAL OF MOLECULAR EVOLUTION
Volume 50, Issue 1, Pages 45-55Publisher
SPRINGER-VERLAG
DOI: 10.1007/s002399910006
Keywords
codon usage; translational selection; synonymous substitution; nonsynonymous substitution; hydrophobicity
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Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae are the ethiological agents of tuberculosis and leprosy, respectively. After performing extensive comparisons between genes from these two GC-rich bacterial species, we were able to construct a set of 275 homologous genes. Since these two bacterial species also have a very low growth rate, translational selection could not be so determinant in their codon preferences as it is in other fast-growing bacteria. Indeed, principal-components analysis of codon usage from this set of homologous genes revealed that the codon choices in M. tuberculosis and M. leprae are correlated not only with compositional constraints and translational selection, but also with the degree of amino acid conservation and the hydrophobicity of the encoded proteins. Finally, significant correlations were found between GC(3) and synonymous distances as well as between synonymous and nonsynonymous distances.
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