Abstract
Among eubacteria and archeabacteria, amino acid composition is correlated with habitat temperatures. In particular, species living at high temperatures have proteins enriched in the amino acids E-R-K and depleted in D-N-Q-T-S-H-A. Here, we show that this bias is a proteome-wide effect in prokaryotes, and that the same trend is observed in fully sequenced mammals and chicken compared to cold-blooded vertebrates (Reptilia, Amphibia and fish). Thus, warm-blooded vertebrates likely experienced genome-wide weak positive selection on amino acid composition to increase protein thermostability.
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Wang, GZ., Lercher, M. Biased amino acid composition in warm-blooded animals. Nat Prec (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/npre.2009.2974.1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/npre.2009.2974.1