pubmed:abstractText |
Synonymous codon usage is typically biased towards translationally superior codons in many organisms. In Drosophila, genomic data indicates that translationally optimal codons and splice optimal codons are mostly mutually exclusive, and adaptation to translational efficiency is reduced in the intron-exon boundary regions where potential exonic splicing enhancers (ESEs) reside. In contrast to genomic scale analyses on large datasets, a refined study on a well-controlled set of samples can be effective in demonstrating the effects of particular splice-related factors. Down syndrome cell adhesion molecule (Dscam) has the largest number of alternatively spliced exons (ASEs) known to date, and the splicing frequency of each ASE is accessible from the relative abundance of the transcript. Thus, these ASEs comprise a unique model system for studying the effect of splicing regulation on synonymous codon usage.
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