Regularities of context-dependent codon bias in eukaryotic genes

Nucleotides surrounding a codon influence the choice of this particular codon from among the group of possible synonymous codons. The strongest influence on codon usage arises from the nucleotide immediately following the codon and is known as the N-1 context. We studied the relative abundance of codons with N-1 contexts in genes from four eukaryotes for which the entire genomes have been sequenced: Homo sapiens, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans and Arabidopsis thaliana. For all the studied organisms it was found that 90% of the codons have a statistically significant N-1 context-dependent codon bias. The relative abundance of each codon with an N-1 context was compared with the relative abundance of the same 4mer oligonucleotide in the whole genome. This comparison showed that in about half of. all cases the context-dependent codon bias could not be explained by the sequence composition of the genome. Ranking statistics were applied to compare context-dependent codon biases for codons from different synonymous groups. We found regularities in N-1 context-dependent codon bias with respect to the codon nucleotide composition. Codons with the same nucleotides in the second and third positions and the same N-1 context have a statistically significant correlation of their relative abundances.