Evaluating rare amino acid substitutions (RGC_CAMs) in a yeast model clade

PLoS One. 2014 Mar 17;9(3):e92213. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0092213. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

When inferring phylogenetic relationships, not all sites in a sequence alignment are equally informative. One recently proposed approach that takes advantage of this inequality relies on sites that contain amino acids whose replacement requires multiple substitutions. Identifying these so-called RGC_CAM substitutions (after Rare Genomic Changes as Conserved Amino acids-Multiple substitutions) requires that, first, at any given site in the amino acid sequence alignment, there must be a minimum of two different amino acids; second, each amino acid must be present in at least two taxa; and third, the amino acids must require a minimum of two nucleotide substitutions to replace each other. Although theory suggests that RGC_CAM substitutions are expected to be rare and less likely to be homoplastic, the informativeness of RGC_CAM substitutions has not been extensively evaluated in biological data sets. We investigated the quality of RGC_CAM substitutions by examining their degree of homoplasy and internode certainty in nearly 2.7 million aligned amino acid sites from 5,261 proteins from five species belonging to the yeast Saccharomyces sensu stricto clade whose phylogeny is well-established. We identified 2,647 sites containing RGC_CAM substitutions, a number that contrasts sharply with the 100,887 sites containing RGC_non-CAM substitutions (i.e., changes between amino acids that require only a single nucleotide substitution). We found that RGC_CAM substitutions had significantly lower homoplasy than RGC_non-CAM ones; specifically RGC_CAM substitutions showed a per-site average homoplasy index of 0.100, whereas RGC_non-CAM substitutions had a homoplasy index of 0.215. Internode certainty values were also higher for sites containing RGC_CAM substitutions than for RGC_non-CAM ones. These results suggest that RGC_CAM substitutions possess a strong phylogenetic signal and are useful markers for phylogenetic inference despite their rarity.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Amino Acid Sequence
  • Amino Acid Substitution*
  • Genome, Fungal / genetics
  • Models, Biological*
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • Phylogeny
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae / genetics*
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins / chemistry
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins / genetics*

Substances

  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins

Grants and funding

KP was funded by the Graduate Program in Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Research in AR‚s laboratory is supported by the National Science Foundation (DEB-0844968). This work was conducted in part using the resources of the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education at Vanderbilt University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.