Nearly neutrality and the evolution of codon usage bias in eukaryotic genomes

Abstract

Here I show that the mean codon usage bias of a genome, and of the lowly expressed genes in a genome, is largely similar across eukaryotes ranging from unicellular protists to vertebrates. Conversely, this bias in housekeeping genes and in highly expressed genes has a remarkable inverse relationship with species generation time that varies by more than four orders of magnitude. The relevance of these results to the nearly neutral theory of molecular evolution is discussed.