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Updated: Mar 13, 2026

Author Spotlight: A Computational Approach to Decipher Amino Acid Preferences in Multispecific Protein-Protein Interactions
Published on: January 26, 2024
Highly expressed proteins have an increased frequency of alanine in the second amino acid position
Age Tats1, Maido Remm, Tanel Tenson
1Department of Bioinformatics, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Tartu, Riia 23, Tartu 51010, Estonia. age.tats@ut.ee
Background:
Although the sequence requirements for translation initiation regions have been frequently analysed, usually the highly expressed genes are not treated as a separate dataset.
Results:
To investigate this, we analysed the mRNA regions downstream of initiation codons in nine bacteria, three archaea and three unicellular eukaryotes, comparing the dataset of highly expressed genes to the dataset of all genes. In addition to the detailed analysis of the nucleotide and codon frequencies we compared the N-termini of highly expressed proteins to the N-termini of all proteins coded in the genome.
Conclusion:
The most conserved pattern was observed at the amino acid level: strong alanine over-representation was observed at the second amino acid position of highly expressed proteins. This pattern is well conserved in all three domains of life.
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