RESEARCH ARTICLE Codon usage biases co-evolve with transcription termination machinery to suppress premature cleavage and polyadenylation Zhipeng Zhou1†, Yunkun Dang2,3†*, Mian Zhou4, Haiyan Yuan1, Yi Liu1* 1Department of Physiology, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, United States; 2State Key Laboratory for Conservation and Utilization of Bio- Resources in Yunnan, Yunnan University, Kunming, China; 3Center for Life Science, School of Life Sciences, Yunnan University, Kunming, China; 4State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China Abstract Codon usage biases are found in all genomes and influence protein expression levels. The codon usage effect on protein expression was thought to be mainly due to its impact on translation. Here, we show that transcription termination is an important driving force for codon usage bias in eukaryotes. Using Neurospora crassa as a model organism, we demonstrated that introduction of rare codons results in premature transcription termination (PTT) within open reading frames and abolishment of full-length mRNA. PTT is a wide-spread phenomenon in Neurospora, and there is a strong negative correlation between codon usage bias and PTT events. Rare codons lead to the formation of putative poly(A) signals and PTT. A similar role for codon *For correspondence: usage bias was also observed in mouse cells. Together, these results suggest that codon usage
[email protected] (YD); biases co-evolve with the transcription termination machinery to suppress premature termination of
[email protected] (YL) transcription and thus allow for optimal gene expression. †These authors contributed DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.33569.001 equally to this work Competing interests: The authors declare that no Introduction competing interests exist.