An Overexpression Experiment Does Not Support the Hypothesis That Avoidance of Toxicity Determines the Rate of Protein Evolution

The misfolding avoidance hypothesis postulates that sequence mutations render proteins cytotoxic and therefore the higher the gene expression, the stronger the operation of selection against substitutions. This translates into prediction that relative toxicity of extant proteins is higher for those evolving faster. In the present experiment, we selected pairs of yeast genes which were paralogous but evolving at different rates. We expressed them artificially to high levels. We expected that toxicity would be higher for ones bearing more mutations, especially that overcrowding should rather exacerbate than reverse the already existing differences in misfolding rates. We did find that the applied mode of overexpression caused a considerable decrease in fitness and that the decrease was proportional to the amount of excessive protein. However, it was not higher for proteins which are normally expressed at lower levels (and have less conserved sequence). This result was obtained consistently, regardless whether the rate of growth or ability to compete in common cultures was used as a proxy for fitness. In additional experiments, we applied factors that reduce accuracy of translation or enhance structural instability of proteins. It did not change a consistent pattern of independence between the fitness cost caused by overexpression of a protein and the rate of its sequence evolution.