http://petrov.stanford.edu/ Petrov Lab News en-us http://petrov.stanford.edu/ Thursday, August 13, 2009 Yuan Zhu, a second year graduate student from Genetics, is done with her rotations and has decided to join our lab. In her rotation project she studied evoltuion of prokaryotic genome size. It is not yet clear what she will focus on in her dissertation - she is broadly interested in the theoretical and experimental aspects of genome evolution, evolution of complex traits, and population genetics. She is hoping to combine experimental and theoretical/computation work in her thesis. We are all delighted with her choice! http://petrov.stanford.edu/pdfs/65.pdf In many genomes some codons improve rates and the accuracy of translation compared to other synonymous codons for the same amino acid. The identity of optimal codons varies greatly and at first glance idiosyncratically among organisms. In a recent study published in PLoS Genetics Ruth Hershberg and Dmitri Petrov provide as far as we know the first ever set of rules for the choice of optimal codons and also describe a simple model for how the identities of optimal codons can shift in evolution. First we systematically identified the optimal codons of 675 bacteria, 52 archea, and 10 fungi. Using these data, we showed that universally across all bacteria, archea, and fungi the identity of the favored codons tracks the nucleotide content of the genome as a whole. In AT-rich organisms primarily AT-rich codons are optimal. Conversely, GC-rich codons are optimal in the GC-rich organisms. This rule is dominant; however once this rule is taken into account, additional universal amino acid specific rules governing the identity of selectively favored codons became apparent. We used these findings to offer a scenario as to how the identity of optimal codons can shift between genomes by tracking the nucleotide patterns of the genome. Importantly our model does not require even a temporary reduction in the strength of natural selection and is thus prima facie much more plausible that the known alternatives.