title: Universality and Shannon entropy of codon usage.
abstract: The distribution functions of codon usage probabilities, computed over all the available GenBank data for 40 eukaryotic biological species and five chloroplasts, are best fitted by the sum of a constant, an exponential, and a linear function in the rank of usage. For mitochondria the analysis is not conclusive. These functions are characterized by parameters that strongly depend on the total guanine and cytosine (GC) content of the coding regions of biological species. It is predicted that the codon usage is the same in all exonic genes with the same GC content. The Shannon entropy for codons, also strongly dependent on the exonic GC content, is computed.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Annecy-le-Vieux de Physique Théorique LAPTH, CNRS, UMR 5108 associée à l'Université de Savoie, Boîte Postale 110, F-74941 Annecy-le-Vieux Cedex, France. frappat@lapp.in2p3.fr
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Frappat
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Minichini
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sciarrino
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sorba
mesh_terms: D000596:Amino Acids / Q000737:chemistry; D000818:Animals; D002736:Chloroplasts / Q000378:metabolism*; D003062:Codon; D019295:Computational Biology; D019277:Entropy; D004926:Escherichia coli / Q000378:metabolism; D005057:Eukaryotic Cells / Q000378:metabolism; D005815:Genetic Code; D016678:Genome; D016680:Genome, Bacterial; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D008928:Mitochondria / Q000378:metabolism; D008957:Models, Genetic; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011336:Probability
chemical_list: D000596:Amino Acids; D003062:Codon