Studying the Evolution of Codon Context in Conserved Gene Sequences

Several studies demonstrate that the codon context is an important characteristic in gene primary structure that modulates the translation of mRNA. To better understand these features we developed a software package that uses sequences of open reading frames (ORFs) available in public databases and applies several statistic and visualization methodologies to unveil codon-context patterns, codon usage and others features. In this paper we describe a new method to study the evolution of codon contexts in conserved sequences between species. For this, we associate the codon-context statistic significance with BLASTP and ClustalW metrics. With these results it is possible to reveal important rules in the evolution of codon-pair context.