Codon usage bias creates a ramp of hydrogen bonding at the 5′-end in prokaryotic ORFeomes

Abstract

Codon usage bias exerts control over a wide variety of molecular processes. The positioning of synonymous codons within coding sequences (CDSs) dictates protein expression by mechanisms such as local translation efficiency, mRNA Gibbs free energy, and protein co-translational folding. In this work, we explore how codon variants affect the position-dependent content of hydrogen bonding, which in turn influences energy requirements for unwinding double-stranded DNA. By analyzing over 14,000 bacterial, archaeal, and fungal ORFeomes, we found that Bacteria and Archaea exhibit an exponential ramp of hydrogen bonding at the 5'-end of CDSs, while a similar ramp was not found in Fungi. The ramp develops within the first 20 codon positions in prokaryotes, eventually reaching a steady carrying capacity of hydrogen bonding that does not differ from Fungi. Selection against uniformity tests proved that selection acts against synonymous codons with high content of hydrogen bonding at the 5'-end of prokaryotic ORFeomes. Overall, this study provides novel insights into the molecular feature of hydrogen bonding that is governed by the genetic code at the 5'-end of CDSs. A web-based application to analyze the position-dependent hydrogen bonding of ORFeomes has been developed and is publicly available (https://juanvillada.shinyapps.io/hbonds/).