The influence of protein coding sequences on protein folding rates of all-β proteins

It is currently believed that the protein folding rate is related to the protein structures and its amino acid sequence. However, few studies have been done on the problem that whether the protein folding rate is influenced by its corresponding mRNA sequence. In this paper, we analyzed the possible relationship between the protein folding rates and the corresponding mRNA sequences. The content of guanine and cytosine (GC content) of palindromes in protein coding sequence was introduced as a new parameter and added in the Gromiha's model of predicting protein folding rates to inspect its effect in protein folding process. The multiple linear regression analysis and jack-knife test show that the new parameter is significant. The linear correlation coefficient between the experimental and the predicted values of the protein folding rates increased significantly from 0.96 to 0.99, and the population variance decreased from 0.50 to 0.24 compared with Gromiha's results. The results show that the GC content of palindromes in the corresponding protein coding sequence really influences the protein folding rate. Further analysis indicates that this kind of effect mostly comes from the synonymous codon usage and from the information of palindrome structure itself, but not from the translation information from codons to amino acids.