A set of amino acids found to occur more frequently in human and fly than in plant and yeast proteomes consists of non-essential amino acids

We investigated the hypothesis that essential amino acids are being replaced in proteins by non-essential amino acids. We compared the amino acid composition in human, worm and fly proteomes, organisms that cannot synthesize all amino acids, with the amino acids of the proteomes of plant, bakers yeast and budding yeast, which are capable of synthesizing them. The analysis covered 460,737 proteins (212,197,907 amino acids). The data suggest a bias towards the usage of non-essential amino acids (mostly the set GAPQC) by metazoan organisms, except for the worm, a Pseudocoelomata. Our results support the hypothesis that non-essential amino acids have been substituting essential ones in the Coelomata.