Codon Deviation Coefficient: A novel measure for estimating codon usage bias and its statistical significance

Zhang Zhang, Jun Li, Peng Cui, Feng Ding, Ang Li, Jeffrey P Townsend, Jun Yu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

47 Scopus citations

Abstract

Background: Genetic mutation, selective pressure for translational efficiency and accuracy, level of gene expression, and protein function through natural selection are all believed to lead to codon usage bias (CUB). Therefore, informative measurement of CUB is of fundamental importance to making inferences regarding gene function and genome evolution. However, extant measures of CUB have not fully accounted for the quantitative effect of background nucleotide composition and have not statistically evaluated the significance of CUB in sequence analysis.Results: Here we propose a novel measure--Codon Deviation Coefficient (CDC)--that provides an informative measurement of CUB and its statistical significance without requiring any prior knowledge. Unlike previous measures, CDC estimates CUB by accounting for background nucleotide compositions tailored to codon positions and adopts the bootstrapping to assess the statistical significance of CUB for any given sequence. We evaluate CDC by examining its effectiveness on simulated sequences and empirical data and show that CDC outperforms extant measures by achieving a more informative estimation of CUB and its statistical significance.Conclusions: As validated by both simulated and empirical data, CDC provides a highly informative quantification of CUB and its statistical significance, useful for determining comparative magnitudes and patterns of biased codon usage for genes or genomes with diverse sequence compositions. 2012 Zhang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)43
JournalBMC Bioinformatics
Volume13
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 23 2012

Bibliographical note

KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Biochemistry
  • Molecular Biology
  • Computer Science Applications

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