Study of the Specific Contextual Features of Translation Initiation and Termination Sites in Saccharomyces Cerevisiae

Investigation of mRNA sequence organization is of importance to reveal the features influencing translation efficiency and specificity. We performed statistical analysis of translation initiation and termination sites of well-studied eukaryotic organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Yeast mRNAs were analyzed using trinucleotide weight matrices and vocabularies of significant oligonucleotide motifs. A statistically significant difference of nucleotide contexts between high- and low-expressed mRNAs was found. Computer simulation of evolution using genetic algorithm demonstrated that the rate-limiting stage model could explain this phenomenon.