Global importance of RNA secondary structures in protein-coding sequences

Fricke, Markus; Gerst, Ruman; Ibrahim, Bashar; Niepmann, Michael; Marz, Manja

MOTIVATION: The protein-coding sequences of messenger RNAs are the linear template for translation of the gene sequence into protein. Nevertheless, the RNA can also form secondary structures by intramolecular base-pairing. RESULTS: We show that the nucleotide distribution within codons is biased in all taxa of life on a global scale. Thereby, RNA secondary structures that require base-pairing between the position 1 of a codon with the position 1 of an opposing codon (here named RNA secondary structure class c(1)) are under-represented. We conclude that this bias may result from the co-evolution of codon sequence and mRNA secondary structure, suggesting that RNA secondary structures are generally important in protein-coding regions of mRNAs. The above result also implies that codon position 2 has a smaller influence on the amino acid choice than codon position 1. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.