Learning from the Codon Table: Convergent Recoding Provides Novel Understanding on the Evolution of A-to-I RNA Editing

Adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) RNA editing recodes the genetic information. Apart from diversifying the proteome, another tempting advantage of RNA recoding is to correct deleterious DNA mutation and restore ancestral allele. Solid evidences for beneficial restorative editing are very rare in animals. By searching for "convergent recoding" under a phylogenetic context, we proposed this term for judging the potential restorative functions of particular editing site. For the well-known mammalian Gln>Arg (Q>R) recoding site, its ancestral state in vertebrate genomes was the pre-editing Gln, and all 470 available mammalian genomes strictly avoid other three equivalent ways to achieve Arg in protein. The absence of convergent recoding from His>Arg, or synonymous mutations on Gln codons, could be attributed to the strong maintenance on editing motif and structure, but the absence of direct A-to-G mutation is extremely unexpected. With similar ideas, we found cases of convergent recoding in Drosophila genus, reducing the possibility of their restorative function. In summary, we defined an interesting scenario of convergent recoding, the occurrence of which could be used as preliminary judgements for whether a recoding site has a sole restorative role. Our work provides novel insights to the natural selection and evolution of RNA editing.