%0 Journal Article
%T Measure of synonymous codon usage diversity among genes in bacteria
%A Haruo Suzuki
%A Rintaro Saito
%A Masaru Tomita
%J BMC Bioinformatics
%D 2009
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2105-10-167
%X The application of Dmean to 268 bacterial genomes shows that in bacteria with extremely biased genomic G+C compositions there is little diversity in synonymous codon usage among genes. Furthermore, our findings contradict previous reports. For example, a low level of diversity in codon usage among genes has been reported for Helicobacter pylori, but based on Dmean, the diversity level of this species is higher than those of more than half of bacteria tested here. The discrepancies between our findings and previous reports are probably due to differences in the methods used for measuring codon usage diversity.We recommend that Dmean be used to measure the diversity level of codon usage among genes. This measure can be applied to other compositional features such as amino acid usage and dinucleotide relative abundance as a genomic signature.Most amino acids can be encoded by more than one codon (i.e., a triplet of nucleotides); such codons are described as being synonymous, and usually differ by one nucleotide in the third position. In most bacteria, alternative synonymous codons are not used with equal frequencies. Grantham et al. [1] showed that genes from same species often show similar patterns of codon usage, and proposed the 'genome hypothesis' that there exists a species-specific pattern of codon usage. Then, it was shown that in many organisms there are also considerable differences in codon usage among genes within a genome [2]. Previous analyses of codon usage diversity in bacteria have mostly focused on individual genomes, with no quantitative attempt to compare the diversity levels among different genomes. For comparative genomic analysis, it is desirable to quantify the level of codon usage diversity among genes in such a way that the estimates could be compared among genomes.Different factors have been proposed to explain the preferential usage of a subset of synonymous codons, including biased mutation pressure (genome-wide mutational bias toward G/C or
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/167