The modification of adenosine to inosine at position 34 of tRNA anticodons has a profound impact upon codon-anticodon recognition. In bacteria, I34 is thought to exist only in tRNAArg, while in eukaryotes the modification is present in eight different tRNAs. In eukaryotes, the widespread use of I34 strongly influenced the evolution of genomes in terms of tRNA gene abundance and codon usage. In humans, codon usage indicates that I34 modified tRNAs are preferred for the translation of highly repetitive coding sequences, suggesting that I34 is an important modification for the synthesis of proteins of highly skewed amino acid composition. Here we extend the analysis of distribution of codons that are recognized by I34 containing tRNAs to all phyla known to use this modification. We find that the preference for codons recognized by such tRNAs in genes with highly biased codon compositions is universal among eukaryotes, and we report that, unexpectedly, some bacterial phyla show a similar preference. We demonstrate that the genomes of these bacterial species contain previously undescribed tRNA genes that are potential substrates for deamination at position 34.
Keywords: ADAT; CDS; Evolution; Speciation; TadA; Transcriptome; Translation; mRNA; tRNA.