I wrote in a previous post that, in yeast, the codon adaptation of a transcript explains ~40% of the variation in expressed levels. Extending this analysis to a protein data set from the same experiment, I stated that codon adaptation explains, contrastingly, very little of expression. More recently, to verify this result, we analysed codon adaptation trends in a second independent protein data set. In this data set codon adaptation does appear to be significant, again explaining approximately ~40% of the variation. Therefore in one dataset measured protein expression is unrelated to codon adaptation, while in the second, expression is.
This disparity in results is not the reason I’m writing this post, but rather last week while I revising the manuscript I was looking for a reference on codon adaptation in yeast. A Google search for this finds the post I’ve just described, where I state that CAI is not important for protein expression. Having your own blog appear in a Google search is rather surprising, even more so when, in hindsight I know the posted findings are not completely correct. If someone else did a similar search, and found my post, how seriously would they consider the results? Well probably not much since the data is on a blog, and not in a journal; but it has made me think about posting results that further investigation disproves, but still persist on the web in a Google indexed blog post.
Once my manuscript is (hopefully) published, I will go back through all my previous blog posts and link them to the article. This way, anyone finding this blog or any posts will be directed to the manuscript that describes the ultimate findings more accurately and in more detail; after peer review