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Chursov, A.* ; Frishman, D. ; Shneider, A.*

Conservation of mRNA secondary structures may filter out mutations in Escherichia coli evolution.

Nucleic Acids Res. 41, 7854-7860 (2013)
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Open Access Gold
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Recent reports indicate that mutations in viral genomes tend to preserve RNA secondary structure, and those mutations that disrupt secondary structural elements may reduce gene expression levels, thereby serving as a functional knockout. In this article, we explore the conservation of secondary structures of mRNA coding regions, a previously unknown factor in bacterial evolution, by comparing the structural consequences of mutations in essential and nonessential Escherichia coli genes accumulated over 40 000 generations in the course of the 'long-term evolution experiment'. We monitored the extent to which mutations influence minimum free energy (MFE) values, assuming that a substantial change in MFE is indicative of structural perturbation. Our principal finding is that purifying selection tends to eliminate those mutations in essential genes that lead to greater changes of MFE values and, therefore, may be more disruptive for the corresponding mRNA secondary structures. This effect implies that synonymous mutations disrupting mRNA secondary structures may directly affect the fitness of the organism. These results demonstrate that the need to maintain intact mRNA structures imposes additional evolutionary constraints on bacterial genomes, which go beyond preservation of structure and function of the encoded proteins.
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Publication type Article: Journal article
Document type Scientific Article
Corresponding Author
Keywords B Strains Rel606 ; Coding Regions ; Translation Initiation ; Synonymous Mutations ; Genome Sequences ; Gene-expression ; In-vivo ; Codon ; Localization ; Adaptation
ISSN (print) / ISBN 0305-1048
e-ISSN 1362-4962
Journal Nucleic Acids Research
Quellenangaben Volume: 41, Issue: 16, Pages: 7854-7860 Article Number: , Supplement: ,
Publisher Oxford University Press
Non-patent literature Publications
Reviewing status Peer reviewed
Institute(s) Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (IBIS)