title: An extended genetic scale of reading frame coding.
abstract: The reading frame coding (RFC) of codes (sets) of trinucleotides is a genetic concept which has been largely ignored during the last 50 years. An extended definition of the statistical parameter PrRFC (Michel, 2014) is proposed here for analysing the probability (efficiency) of reading frame coding of usage of any trinucleotide code. It is applied to the analysis of the RFC efficiency of usage of the C(3) self-complementary trinucleotide circular code X identified in prokaryotic and eukaryotic genes (Arquès and Michel, 1996). The usage of X is called usage XU. The highest RFC probabilities of usage XU are identified in bacterial plasmids and bacteria (about 49.0%). Then, by decreasing values, the RFC probabilities of usage XU are observed in archaea (47.5%), viruses (45.4%) and nuclear eukaryotes (42.8%). The lowest RFC probabilities of usage XU are found in mitochondria and chloroplasts (about 36.5%). Thus, genes contain information for reading frame coding. Such a genetic property which to our knowledge has never been identified, may bring new insights in the origin and evolution of the genetic code.
authors.affiliation: Theoretical bioinformatics, ICube, University of Strasbourg, CNRS, 300 Boulevard Sébastien Brant, 67400 Illkirch, France. Electronic address: c.michel@unistra.fr.
authors.forename: Christian J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Michel
mesh_terms: D001105:Archaea / Q000235:genetics*; D001419:Bacteria / Q000235:genetics*; D002736:Chloroplasts / Q000235:genetics; D003062:Codon / Q000235:genetics*; D056890:Eukaryota / Q000235:genetics*; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D008928:Mitochondria / Q000235:genetics; D016364:Reading Frames / Q000502:physiology*
chemical_list: D003062:Codon
keywords: Circular code usage; Coding evolution; Genetic scale; Reading frame coding; Trinucleotide circular code