Genomic style of proteins: concepts, methods and analyses of ribosomal proteins from 16 microbial species

We have introduced the concept of genomic 'style' of proteins. By style we understand those properties of a large set of proteins which are specific to the genome of one species (species primary-self) and different from the genome of another species (species contrasted-self). To characterise the style, we took advantage of the frequencies of amino acids and dipeptides present in non-identical segments of the complete set of orthologous ribosomal proteins encoded by 16 microbial species. We confirm the dependence of the overall amino acid composition on the genomic (G+C) content, and introduce a rectification procedure making it possible to extricate appropriate species-specific characteristics, which are no longer related to this content. The rectified frequencies are used to calculate inter-species distance matrices, and to build genomic evolutionary trees. Remarkably, the phylograms derived from the frequencies of non-identical residues in proteins closely resemble the classical phylograms based upon the conservation of identical residues in ribosomal RNAs. We believe that the concept of genomic style of proteins can be a useful tool for the study of evolution.