Cross-Species Analysis of Genic GC(3) Content and DNA Methylation Patterns

The GC content in the third codon position (GC3) exhibits a unimodal distribution in many plant and animal genomes. Interestingly, grasses and homeotherm vertebrates exhibit a unique bimodal distribution. High GC3 was previously found to be associated with variable expression, higher frequency of upstream TATA boxes, and an increase of GC3 from 5′ to 3′. Moreover, GC3-rich genes are predominant in certain gene classes and are enriched in CpG dinucleotides that are potential targets for methylation. Based on the GC3 bimodal distribution we hypothesize that GC3 has a regulatory role involving methylation and gene expression. To test that hypothesis, we selected diverse taxa (rice, thale cress, bee, and human) that varied in the modality of their GC3 distribution and tested the association between GC3, DNA methylation, and gene expression. We examine the relationship between cytosine methylation levels and GC3, gene expression, genome signature, gene length, and other gene compositional features. We find a strong negative correlation (Pearson’s correlation coefficient r = −0.67, P value < 0.0001) between GC3 and genic CpG methylation. The comparison between 5′-3′ gradients of CG3-skew and genic methylation for the taxa in the study suggests interplay between gene-body methylation and transcription-coupled cytosine deamination effect. Compositional features are correlated with methylation levels of genes in rice, thale cress, human, bee, and fruit fly (which acts as an unmethylated control). These patterns allow us to generate evolutionary hypotheses about the relationships between GC3 and methylation and how these affect expression patterns. Specifically, we propose that the opposite effects of methylation and compositional gradients along coding regions of GC3-poor and GC3-rich genes are the products of several competing processes.