CORE PROMOTER INFORMATION CONTENT COR- RELATES WITH OPTIMAL GROWTH TEMPERATURE

ARIEL APTEKMANN, ALEJANDRO NADRA

Congreso; Reunión Conjunta de Sociedades de BioCiencias; 2017

The subtle mechanisms by which protein-DNA interactions remainfunctional across a wide range of temperatures are largely unknown.In this work, we manually curated available information relating fullysequenced archaeal genomes with organism growth temperatures.We built a motif that represents the core promoter of each speciesand calculated its information content. We then studied the relationbetween optimal growth temperature (OGT) and information content(IC) in the promoter region.We found a positive correlation betweenG+C content and OGT in tRNA regions and not in overall genome.Furthermore, we found that there is a positive correlation betweeninformation content and optimal growth temperatures in Archaea.This can?t be explained by an increased C+G composition nor byother obvious mechanisms. These findings suggest that increasedinformation content could produce a positive fitness in organismsliving at high temperatures. We suggest that molecular informationtheory may need to be adapted for hyperthermophiles.We finally explore the posibility of this fenomena becoming evidentat lesser temperature differences, such as those found between mi-thocondria and nucleus