Do universal codon-usage patterns minimize the effects of mutation and translation error?

Roberto Márquez, Sandra Smit, Rob Knight

Genome biology · 2005 · 27 citations · 24 references

DOIFull text

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Abstract

These unexpected findings suggest that selection against translation error has not produced codon or amino-acid usages that minimize the effects of errors, and that even messages with very different nucleotide compositions somehow maintain a relatively constant error value. They raise the question: why do all known organisms use highly error-minimizing genetic codes, but fail to minimize the errors in the mRNA messages they encode?

References

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