Prevalent Accumulation of Non-Optimal Codons through Somatic Mutations in Human Cancers

Cancer is characterized by uncontrolled cell growth, and the cause of different cancers is generally attributed to checkpoint dysregulation of cell proliferation and apoptosis. Recent studies have shown that non-optimal codons were preferentially adopted by genes to generate cell cycle-dependent oscillations in protein levels. This raises the intriguing question of how dynamic changes of codon usage modulate the cancer genome to cope with a non-controlled proliferative cell cycle. In this study, we comprehensively analyzed the somatic mutations of codons in human cancers, and found that non-optimal codons tended to be accumulated through both synonymous and non-synonymous mutations compared with other types of genomic substitution. We further demonstrated that non-optimal codons were prevalently accumulated across different types of cancers, amino acids, and chromosomes, and genes with accumulation of non-optimal codons tended to be involved in protein interaction/signaling networks and encoded important enzymes in metabolic networks that played roles in cancer-related pathways. This study provides insights into the dynamics of codons in the cancer genome and demonstrates that accumulation of non-optimal codons may be an adaptive strategy for cancerous cells to win the competition with normal cells. This deeper interpretation of the patterns and the functional characterization of somatic mutations of codons will help to broaden the current understanding of the molecular basis of cancers.