Interplay between Position-Dependent Codon Usage Bias and Hydrogen Bonding at the 5ʹ End of ORFeomes

Abstract

Redundancy of the genetic code creates a vast space of alternatives to encode a protein. Synonymous codons exert control over a variety of molecular and physiological processes of cells mainly through influencing protein biosynthesis. Recent findings have shown that synonymous codon choice affects transcription by controlling mRNA abundance, mRNA stability, transcription termination, and transcript biosynthesis cost. In this work, by analyzing thousands of Bacteria , Archaea , and Fungi genomes, we extend recent findings by showing that synonymous codon choice, corresponding to the number of hydrogen bonds in a codon, can also have an effect on the energetic requirements for unwinding double-stranded DNA in a position-dependent fashion. This report offers new perspectives on the mechanism behind the transcription-translation coordination and complements previous hypotheses on the resource allocation strategies used by Bacteria and Archaea to manage energy efficiency in gene expression.