Compositional Features and Codon Usage Pattern of Genes Associated with Anxiety in Human

Codon usage bias (CUB) is the unequal usage of synonymous codon; some codons are more preferred than others. CUB analysis has applications in understanding the molecular organization of genome, genetics, gene expression, and molecular evolution. Bioinformatic approach was used to analyze the protein-coding sequences of genes involved in the anxiety to understand the patterns of codon usage as no work was reported yet. The improved effective number of codons (Nc) values ranged from 43.55 to 55.06, with a mean of 44.57, suggested that the overall CUB was low for genes associated with anxiety. The overall GC and AT content was 54.76 and 45.24, respectively. Relative synonymous codon usage (RSCU) analysis revealed that most frequently used codon ended mostly with C or G. The over-represented codons in genes associated with anxiety were CTG, ATC, GTG, AGC, ACC, and GCC, while under-represented codons were TTA, CTT, CTA, ATA, GTT, GTA, TCG, CCG, GCG, CAA, and CGT. Correlation analysis was performed between overall nucleotide composition and its 3rd codon positions, and observed highly significant (p < 0.01) correlation between them suggested that both mutation pressure and natural selection might affect the pattern of CUB. The highly significant correlation (0.598**, p < 0.01) was also observed between GC12 with GC3 suggested that directional mutation pressure might acted on all codon positions for genes associated with anxiety.