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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Identifying Amino Acid Overproducers Using Rare-Codon-Rich Markers
Published on: June 24, 2019
Error minimization explains the codon usage of highly expressed genes in Escherichia coli
Hamed Shateri Najafabadi1, Jean Lehmann, Mohammad Omidi
1Department of Biotechnology, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. shateri@khayam.ut.ac.ir
Abstract:
Different organisms use synonymous codons with different preferences. Several measures have been introduced to compute the extent of codon usage bias within a gene or genome, among which the codon adaptation index (CAI) has been shown to be well correlated with mRNA levels of Escherichia coli. In this work an error adaptation index (eAI) is introduced, which estimates the level at which a gene can tolerate the effects of mistranslations. It is shown that the eAI has a strong correlation with CAI, as well as with mRNA levels, which suggests that the codons of highly expressed genes are selected so that mistranslation would have the minimum possible effect on the structure and function of the related proteins.
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