Effect of protein tag’s codon usage on protein expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that some codons are preferentially used over others for coding the same sequence polypeptide chains. Synonymous codons usage variety appears among different genomes and even among the same genome. The reasons for codon usage are not completely understood yet. In this study based on Saccharomyces cerevisiae we examined expression of optimized and non-optimized sequences that encode the same protein tags, using western blotting and fluorescence microscopy. Both western blotting and microscopy results showed that codon optimization of the tags didn’t have considerable effect on protein expression. On the other hand, small changes in tag amino acid composition had much larger effect on fluorescence signal strength.