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Energy costs constrain the evolution of gene expression
Author(s) -
Wagner Andreas
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of experimental zoology part b: molecular and developmental evolution
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.823
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1552-5015
pISSN - 1552-5007
DOI - 10.1002/jez.b.21152
Subject(s) - biology , gene , gene expression , natural selection , protein expression , transcription (linguistics) , population , genetics , translation (biology) , genome , yeast , expression (computer science) , evolutionary biology , regulation of gene expression , messenger rna , computer science , demography , linguistics , philosophy , sociology , programming language
Changes in gene expression affect the energy budget of a cell. A previous contribution estimated the energetic cost of yeast mRNA and protein expression from very limited information on protein half‐lives. Using recently published genome‐scale measurements of protein half‐lives, I here confirm that even small increases in gene expression are opposed by natural selection. In small organisms with large effective population sizes, the evolution of transcription and translation rates are thus not evolutionarily neutral processes. J. Exp. Zool. (Mol. Dev. Evol.) 308B:322–324, 2007 . © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.