Use of the codon table to quantify the evolutionary role of random mutations
Abstract:
The various biases affecting RNA mutations during evolution is the subject
of intense research, leaving the extent of the role of random mutations
undefined. To remedy this lacuna, using the codon table the number of codons
representing each amino acid was correlated with the amino acid frequencies
in different branches of the evolutionary tree.
The correlations were seen to increase as evolution progressed.
Furthermore, the number of RNA mutations that result in a given amino acid
mutation were found to be correlated with several widely used
amino acid similarity tables (used in sequence alignments).
These correlations were seen to increase when the observed codon usage
was factored in.