Drummond:MistranslationInducedMisfolding2008
This page supports Drummond DA, Wilke CO. Cell. 2008, "Mistranslation-induced protein misfolding as a dominant constraint on coding-sequence evolution," Jul 25;134(2):341-52. Faculty of 1000 rated, preview by Powers and Balch. Download preprint PDF, supplementary materials, and data (below).
Mistranslation-induced misfolding and gene evolution
Strikingly consistent correlations between rates of coding-sequence evolution and gene expression levels are apparent across taxa, but the biological causes behind the selective pressures on coding-sequence evolution remain controversial. Here we demonstrate conserved patterns of simple covariation between sequence evolution, codon usage, and mRNA level in E. coli, yeast, worm, fly, mouse, and human that suggest that all observed trends stem largely from a unified underlying selective pressure. In metazoans, these trends are strongest in tissues composed of neurons, whose structure and lifetime confer extreme sensitivity to protein misfolding. We propose, and demonstrate using a molecular-level evolutionary simulation, that selection against toxicity of misfolded proteins generated by ribosome errors suffices to create all the observed covariation. The mechanistic model of molecular evolution which emerges yields testable biochemical predictions, calls into question use of nonsynonymous-to-synonymous substitution ratios (Ka/Ks) to detect functional selection, and suggests how mistranslation may contribute to neurodegenerative disease.
Data
Evolution and expression data
These tab-delimited files include gene and ortholog identifiers, dN, dS, ts/tv ratio, expression level, Fop, and (for the multicellular organisms) intronic guanine/cytosine (GC) content.
- Evolution and expression data [ZIP archive, ~800K]
Coding sequence alignments
Alignments are in FASTA format, ZIP-compressed.
- E. coli vs. S. typhimurium (~1.8MB)
- S. cerevisiae vs. S. paradoxus (~3.8MB)
- C. elegans vs. C. briggsae (~4.7MB)
- D. melanogaster vs. D. yakuba (~5.3MB)
- M. musculus vs. R. norvegicus (~8.7MB)
- H. sapiens vs. C. familiaris (~8.3MB)
