Luca Caniparoli - SISSA Trieste #
Synonymous but not the same: extracting information from codon bias #
The genetic code is degenerate since most amino acids are translated by 
more than one synonymous codon. Although, the codons aren't used 
randomly and their choice is thought to encode a further layer of 
information. Here we develop a model which, given the sequences of mRNA 
as the only data, is able to capture some of this information: we 
introduce and compute the Codon Information Index (CII) for over 3000 
transcripts from S. Cerevisiae, observing a remarkable correlation with 
the mRNAs and proteins abundance in the cell. Moreover, the CII is 
consistent with an index previously defined in the literature (the tAI).