title: A dissection of volatility in yeast.
abstract: It has been suggested that volatility, the proportion of mutations which change an amino acid, can be used to infer the level of natural selection acting upon a gene. This conjecture is supported by a correlation between volatility and the rate of nonsynonymous substitution (dN), or the ratio of nonsynonymous and synonymous substitution rates, in a variety of organisms. These organisms include yeast, in which the correlations are quite strong. Here we show that these correlations are a by-product of a correlation between synonymous codon bias toward translationally optimal codons and dN. Although this analysis suggests that volatility is not a good measure of the selection, we suggest that it might be possible to infer something about the level of natural selection, from a single genome sequence, using translational codon bias.
authors.affiliation: Section of Evolutionary Biology, Department Biology II, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Planegg-Martinsried, Germany. stoletzki@zi.biologie.uni-muenchen.de
authors.forename: Nina
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Stoletzki
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Welch
authors.forename: Joachim
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hermisson
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Eyre-Walker
mesh_terms: D001483:Base Sequence; D003062:Codon / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005800:Genes, Fungal; D014176:Protein Biosynthesis; D012440:Saccharomyces / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics*; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics*; D012641:Selection, Genetic; D016415:Sequence Alignment; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric
chemical_list: D003062:Codon