The Universal Genetic Code, Protein Coding Genes and Genomes of All Species Were Optimized for Frameshift Tolerance Abstract
bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/067736; this version posted March 20, 2018. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. The shiftability of the protein coding genes 1 The universal genetic code, protein coding genes and genomes of 2 all species were optimized for frameshift tolerance 3 Xiaolong Wang*1, Quanjiang Dong2, Gang Chen1, Jianye Zhang1, Yongqiang Liu1, Jinqiao 4 Zhao1, Haibo Peng1, Yalei Wang1, Yujia Cai1, Xuxiang Wang1, Chao Yang1, Michael Lynch3 5 1. College of Life Sciences, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266003, P. R. China 6 2. Qingdao Municipal Hospital, Qingdao, Shandong, 266003, P. R. China 7 3. Center for Mechanisms of Evolution, BioDesign Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, 8 AZ, 85287-7701 9 Abstract 10 Frameshifted coding genes yield truncated and dysfunctional peptides. Frameshift 11 protein sequences encoded by the alternative reading frames of a coding gene have 12 been considered as meaningless. And frameshift mutations have been considered as 13 utterly harmful and of little or no importance for the molecular evolution of proteins. 14 However, previous studies showed that frameshift coding genes can be expressed, and 15 frameshift proteins can be functional by themselves. By analyzing all coding genes in 16 nine model organisms, here we show that protein coding genes have a quasi-constant 17 shiftability of 0.5: the frameshift protein sequences encoded in the alternative frames 18 remain nearly half conservative when compared with the protein sequence encoded in 19 the main frame.
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