Correlations of nucleotide substitution rates and base composition of mammalian coding sequences with protein structure
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Updated: Oct 18, 2026

Determining the Likelihood of Variant Pathogenicity Using Amino Acid-level Signal-to-Noise Analysis of Genetic Variation
Published on: January 16, 2019
M L Chiusano1, G D'Onofrio, F Alvarez-Valin
1Laboratorio di Evoluzione Molecolare, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples, Italy.
Abstract:
We investigated the relationships between the nucleotide substitution rates and the predicted secondary structures in the three states representation (alpha-helix, beta-sheet, and coil). The analysis was carried out on 34 alignments, each of which comprised sequences belonging to at least four different mammalian orders. The rates of synonymous substitution were found to be significantly different in regions predicted to be alpha-helix, beta-sheet, or coil. Likewise, the nonsynonymous rates also differ, although expectedly at a lower extent, in the three types of secondary structure, suggesting that different selective constraints associated with the different structures are affecting in a similar way the synonymous and nonsynonymous rates. Moreover, the base composition of the third codon positions is different in coding sequence regions corresponding to different secondary structures of proteins.
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