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Bioinformatics Seminar
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Thursday , October 16, 4:15pm, Toxicology Auditorium
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| Speaker: | Dr. D. Allan Drummond, Bauer Fellow, FAS Center for Systems Biology. Harvard University |
| Title: | Oops! How translation errors govern coding sequence evolution |
| Abstract: | At canonical ribosomal error rates, one in five average-length protein
molecules is expected to contain at least one error. If translation
errors sometimes induce protein misfolding, as expected from mutagenesis
experiments, the cell may suffer, creating broad Darwinian pressure to
mitigate the effects of translation errors. We suggest that selection
against mistranslation-induced misfolding explains two major patterns in
coding sequence evolution. First, highly expressed genes evolve slowly
across the tree of life, a trend we show may arise solely from selection
for error-tolerant protein sequences. Second, using a novel and widely
applicable statistical approach, we show that selection for improved
translational accuracy suffices to explain most preferential usage of
synonymous codons in highly expressed genes of Drosophila melanogaster.
We discuss the possibility that the causal cellular cost of these
genomic trends is the cytotoxicity of misfolded proteins, rather than
loss of protein function or cost of synthesis.
Much of this work is joint with Claus Wilke, University of Texas at
Austin. |
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| Page last updated: March 22, 2005 |
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