Abstract
Genome and transcript sequences are composed of long strings of nucleotide monomers (A, C, G and T/U) that require different quantities of nitrogen atoms for biosynthesis. Here it is shown that plants that require more nitrogen for photosynthesis use nucleotides with fewer nitrogen atoms in both genome and transcript sequences. These findings reveal that plant GC content, codon use, and gene sequence evolution are driven by photosynthetic nitrogen demand.
Copyright
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
Posted July 13, 2017.
The amount of nitrogen used for photosynthesis governs molecular evolution in plants
