Moderate Negative Correlation Between The 3’UTR Length And G-C% Content Volume 62- Issue 1

Morgan Seymour^#, Mary Katherine Swanson Lee#, Giulianna Rivero, Kenaz Knowles, Brayden Varnado, Mykael Ledet, Jordan Evans, Gabrielle Terrel, Danequa Buchanan, Charmaine Smith, Loren Belle Evans, Torry Robertson, Wisam Dalati, Long Ma, Bill Zhong, and Alexander Kofman*

• Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Troy University, AL, U.S.A
• ^#Both authors contributed equally to this work

Received: May 14, 2025; Published: May 20, 2025

*Corresponding author: Alexander Kofman, Department of Biological & Environmental Sciences, 210-D MSCX (McCall Hall), Troy University, Troy, AL 36082, U.S.A

DOI: 10.26717/BJSTR.2025.62.009676

Abstract PDF

The presence of cis-acting regulatory elements may depend on the nucleotide content of the gene fragment. We report the moderate negative correlation between the 3’UTR length (500-2000 nucleotides) and the G-C% content.

Keywords: mRNA; 3’UTR; Nucleotide

Abbreviations: mRNA: messenger RNA; UTR: Untranslated Region

Codon usage varies among the biological species and even the genes of the same organisms [1]. Correlations between the codon usage and intron length, the codon pattern (G-C% content at the third codon position) and the cellular and chromosomal location of the genes [2] as well as the reported possible effects of codon usage on mRNA stability [3,4] prompted us to explore the 3’UTR nucleotide content of human genes. We observed the lower G-C% content within 3’UTR as compared to the whole mRNA sequence, which could be explained by the presence of the poly(A) tail. We also found the moderate negative correlation (r=-0.44) between the 3’UTR length (500- 2000 nucleotides) and the G-C% content (Figure 1). We conclude that the asymmetric distribution of microRNA target sites within human mRNA 3’UTR [5] may be related to the nucleotide content variations.

Figure 1

Franziska Ahrend, Travis Varnum, Summer Weeks, Robert Kaltenbach, Martin Bouldo.

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5. A Kofman (2025) unpublished manuscript.