Impact of GC content on gene expression pattern in chicken

Table 1 Relationship between GC content and expression pattern

GC content	Expression level		Expression breadth		Maximum expression
5^′ UTR	r = 0.2328	P < 0.0001	r = 0.2614	P < 0.0001	r = 0.1155	P < 0.0001
CDS	r = − 0.1025	P < 0.0001	r = − 0.1105	P < 0.0001	r = − 0.0675	P = 0.0223
intron	r = − 0.0556	P < 0.0001	r = − 0.0723	P < 0.0001	r = − 0.0191	P = 0.2358
GC₃	r = − 0.1378	P < 0.0001	r = − 0.1624	P < 0.0001	r = 0.0017	P = 0.6028

For each gene, the GC contents of CDS, introns and 5^′ UTR were determined; GC₃ were calculated by codonW 1.4.2.; chicken expression data were directly obtained from Rao et al.[15]; correlation analyses were performed by SAS Proprietary Software Release 8.1; significance tests were corrected for multiple testing by the Bonferroni step-down correction; multiple linear regression analysis indicated that GC content in genes could explain approximately 10% of the variation in gene expression.

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