comparative analyses of base compositions, dna sizes, and dinucleotide frequency profiles in archaeal and bacterial chromosomes and plasmids基本成分的比较分析、dna的大小和二核苷酸频率配置文件在古细菌和细菌染色体和质粒.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Evolutionary Biology Volume 2012, Article ID 342482, 5 pages doi:10.1155/2012/342482 Research Article Comparative Analyses of Base Compositions, DNA Sizes, and Dinucleotide Frequency Profiles in Archaeal and Bacterial Chromosomes and Plasmids Hiromi Nishida Agricultural Bioinformatics Research Unit, Graduate School of Agricultural Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8657, Japan Correspondence should be addressed to Hiromi Nishida, hnishida@iu.a.u-tokyo.ac.jp Received 25 November 2011; Revised 11 January 2012; Accepted 19 January 2012 Academic Editor: Hideaki Nojiri Copyright © 2012 Hiromi Nishida. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In the present paper, I compared guanine-cytosine (GC) contents, DNA sizes, and dinucleotide frequency profiles in 109 archaeal chromosomes, 59 archaeal plasmids, 1379 bacterial chromosomes, and 854 bacterial plasmids. In more than 80% of archaeal and bacterial plasmids, the GC content was lower than that of the host chromosome. Furthermore, most of the differences in GC content found between a plasmid and its host chromosome were less than 10%, and the GC content in plasmids and host chromosomes was highly correlated (Pearson’s correlation coefficient r = 0.965 in bacteria and 0.917 in archaea). These results support the hypothesis that horizontal gene transfers have occurred frequently via plasmid distribution during evolution. GC content and chromosome size were more highly correlated in bacteria (r = 0.460) than in archaea (r = 0.195). Interestingly, there was a tendency for archaea with plasmids to have higher GC content