Elsevier

Virology

Volume 336, Issue 2, 5 June 2005, Pages 137-143
Virology

Rapid communication
Codon volatility does not reflect selective pressure on the HIV-1 genome

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virol.2005.03.014Get rights and content
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Abstract

Codon volatility is defined as the proportion of a codon's point-mutation neighbors that encode different amino acids. The cumulative volatility of a gene in relation to its associated genome was recently reported to be an indicator of selection pressure. We used this approach to measure selection on all available full-length HIV-1 subtype B genomes in the Los Alamos HIV Sequence Database, and compared these estimates against those obtained via established likelihood- and distance-based comparative methods. Volatility failed to correlate with the results of any of the comparative methods demonstrating that it is not a reliable indicator of selection pressure.

Keywords

HIV
Codon volatility
Selective pressure
Evolution

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