The relationships between synonymous and nonsynonymous substitution rates and between synonymous rate and codon usage bias are important to our understanding of the roles of mutation and selection in the evolution of Drosophila genes. Previous studies used approximate estimation methods that ignore codon bias. In this study we reexamine those relationships using maximum-likelihood methods to es...

The intra-host evolution of 73 human immunodeficiency virus type 1 quasispecies was analysed by split decomposition analysis. Non-synonymous and synonymous nucleotide substitutions were counted along the shortest path connecting all sequences and compared with the numbers expected under the assumption of a random model of mutation. For the majority of substitutions, drift and negative selection...

Synonymous codons are widely selected for various biological mechanisms in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Recent evidence suggests that microRNA (miRNA) function may affect synonymous codon choices near miRNA target sites. To better understand this, we perform genome-wide analysis on synonymous codon usage around miRNA target sites in four plant genomes. We observed a general trend of increas...

Analyses of virus evolution in known transmission chains have the potential to elucidate the impact of transmission dynamics on the viral evolutionary rate and its difference within and between hosts. Lin et al. (2015, Journal of Virology, 89/7: 3512-22) recently investigated the evolutionary history of hepatitis B virus in a transmission chain and postulated that the 'colonization-adaptation-t...

Selection, recombination, and the demographic history of a species can all have profound effects on genomewide patterns of variability. To assess the impact of these forces in the genome of Drosophila miranda, we examine polymorphism and divergence patterns at 62 loci scattered across the genome. In accordance with recent findings in D. melanogaster, we find that noncoding DNA generally evolves...

Quantifying the number of deleterious mutations per diploid human genome is of crucial concern to both evolutionary and medical geneticists. Here we combine genome-wide polymorphism data from PCR-based exon resequencing, comparative genomic data across mammalian species, and protein structure predictions to estimate the number of functionally consequential single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)...

DNA sequence polymorphism and codon usage bias were investigated in a set of 41 nuclear loci in the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas. Our results revealed a very high level of DNA polymorphism in oysters, in the order of magnitude of the highest levels reported in animals to date. A total of 290 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were detected, 76 of which being localised in exons and 214 i...

Examination of polymorphisms in the Plasmodium falciparum gene for falcipain 2 revealed that this gene is one of two paralogs separated by 10.8 kb in chromosome 11. We designate the annotated gene denoted chr11.gen_424 as encoding falcipain 2A and the annotated gene denoted chr11.gen_427 as encoding falcipain 2B. The paralogs are 96% identical at the nucleotide level and 93% identical at the am...

Abstract A common framing has it that any adequate treatment of quotation to abandon one the following three principles: (i) The quoted expression is a syntactic constituent quote phrase; (ii) If two expressions are derived by applying same rule sequence synonymous expressions, then they synonymous; (iii) language contains but distinct expressions. In following, formal syntax and semantics will...