Comparative analysis of Archean core promoter region information content and its relation with optimal growth temperature

ARIEL APTEKMANN AND ALEJANDRO NADRA.

CABA

Congreso; 4th International Society for Computational Biology-LatinAmerica; 2016

The relationship between information and energy is key to understanding biological systems. We studied the relation between optimal growth temperature (OGT) and information content (IC), in the core promoter region of all the archeal genomes published to date, by calculating the information content of the motiff that represents the TATA binding site (TBS). We have tested several different approaches to predict transcription start sites (TSS) in a given genome. We then used motiff prediction software in the flanking regions to the TSS, and constructed a database, compiling already available information from published sources, that contains characteristic growth conditions for each strain. We show that there is a positive correlation between information content and optimal growth temperatures in archeas, and this effect can?t be explained solely by an increased CG composition. This findings show that increased information content could have a positive fitness under certain conditions. We suggest that selective pressure towards binding sites with higher binding affinity to the protein could be the reason for this correlation. We propose to reformulate the established relation between Rsequence and Rfrequency from molecular information theory [1] extending it to take into account the effect of temperature.