Is the Synonymous Substitution Rate in Mammals Gene-Specific?

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Abstract
There is a great deal of variation in silent rates of evolution (Ks) between genes in the same species pair comparison (Bernardi, Mouchiroud, and Gautier 1993 ; Wolfe and Sharp 1993 ; Mouchiroud, Gautier, and Bernardi 1995 ). This may represent random fluctuation (Kumar and Subramanian 2002 ) or may be deterministically caused. Evidence for the latter comes from the finding that the rate of silent site evolution of a gene is repeatable across independent lineages (Bulmer, Wolfe, and Sharp 1991 ; Mouchiroud, Gautier, and Bernardi 1995 ; Bielawski, Dunn, and Yang 2000 ). Most notably, Mouchiroud, Gautier, and Bernardi (1995) found that the number of synonymous substitutions per synonymous site (Ks) for a gene in the human-cow comparison was a very strong predictor of the Ks of the same gene in the mouse-rat comparison.