Detecting Prospective Mutation Regions by Codon Usage—A Bioinformatics Approach

ABSTRACT

The variation in comparative frequency of synonymous codons in different coding sequences is often used as a factor when the evolution speed and conservativity of the sequence is evaluated. Major objective of the study is to test the level to which codon usage bias and mutation frequencies are related. For this purpose the specific codon usage bias statistics is applied for determining whether these coding regions can be regarded as a separate group. The Swiss-Prot data on human gene variations was used along with the EMBOSS tool CUSP to gather codon usage data from the latest RefSeq human mRNA version. The obtained data was statistically analyzed in order to determine whether a line can be drawn between sequences with a large number of mutations and sequences with a low or no variation.

Keywords:

• bioinformatics
• codon usage bias
• EMBOSS
• mutation likelihood