GC-content, the ratio of guanine and cytosine bases in an entire nucleotide sequence, and palindromic sequences are unique for every organism due to genomic evolution. The goals of our research was to establish a correlation between GC-content and palindromic densities in wild-type viral and randomly-generated genomes. Forty viral genomes were downloaded from GenBank and their GC-ratios and pal...

Lactobacillus curvatus is one of the most prevalent lactic acid bacteria found in fermented meat products. Here, we present the draft genome sequence of Lactobacillus curvatus CRL705, a bacteriocin producer strain isolated from an Argentinean artisanal fermented sausage, which consists of 1,833,251 bp (GC content, 41.9%) and two circular plasmids of 12,342 bp (pRC12; GC, 43.9%) and 18,664 bp (p...

When the stop codons TGA, TAA, and TAG are found in the second and third reading frames of a protein-encoding gene, they are considered premature stop codons (PSC). Deinococcus radiodurans disproportionately favored TGA more than the other two triplets as a PSC. The TGA triplet was also found more often in noncoding regions and as a stop codon, though the bias was less pronounced. We investigat...

The study explored instructional benefits of a storyline gaming characteristic (GC) on learning effectiveness, efficiency, and engagement with the use of an online instructional simulation for graduate students in an introductory statistics course. A storyline is a game-design element that connects scenes with the educational content. In order to examine the interactions between the storyline G...

Effective translation of the viral genome during the infection cycle most likely enhances its fitness. In this study, we reveal two different strategies employed by cyanophages, viruses infecting cyanobacteria, to enhance their translation efficiency. Cyanophages of the T7-like Podoviridae family adjust their GC content and codon usage to those of their hosts. In contrast, cyanophages of the T4...

Whether particular amino acids are favored by selection at high temperatures over others has long been an open question in protein evolution. One way to approach this question is to compare homologous sites in proteins from one thermophile and a closely related mesophile; asymmetrical substitution patterns have been taken as evidence for selection favoring certain amino acids over others. Howev...

• A DNA molecule consists of two strands, commonly referred to as top and bottom; positive and negative; or normal and reverse. The contents of one strand form a reverse complement of the other strand. The ”complement” part: A(denine) is always paired with Thymine, while Cytosine is always paired with Guanine. The ”reverse” part: the strand are read in opposite directions: the 5’ end of one str...

We derive theoretical upper and lower bounds on the maximum size of DNA codes of length n with constant GC-content w and minimum Hamming distance d, both with and without the additional constraint that the minimum Hamming distance between any codeword and the reverse-complement of any codeword be at least d. We also explicitly construct codes that are larger than the best previously-published c...

Study of the nucleotide composition in Drosophila, focusing on the saltans and willistoni groups, has revealed unanticipated differences in nucleotide composition among lineages. Compositional differences are associated with an accelerated rate of nucleotide substitution in functionally less constrained regions. These observations have been set forth against the extended opinion that the patter...

The study of base composition evolution in Drosophila has been achieved mostly through the analysis of coding sequences. Third codon position GC content, however, is influenced by both neutral forces (e.g., mutation bias) and natural selection for codon usage optimization. In this article, large data sets of noncoding DNA sequence polymorphism in D. melanogaster and D. simulans were gathered fr...