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Ancient introns

The origins of introns and their evolutionary role remain unclear. In the November 6 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Fedorov et al. describe the use of a computer program, called INTRONMAP to present evidence for the existence of ancient introns (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2001, 98:13177-13182). They used the program to map intron positions onto homologous genes encoding proteins for which the three-dimensional structure is known. They applied the program to 665 nonredundant protein sequences in the Protein Data Bank and mapped over 8,000 introns. The result was a correlation of phase-zero introns with module boundaries in proteins, corresponding to ancient conserved regions (ACR). There was no correlation for phase-one or phase-two positions, or for non-ACR proteins (which presumably represent 'modern' genes).

References

  1. What introns have to tell us: hierarchy in genome evolution.

  2. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, [http://www.pnas.org]

  3. INTONMAP, [http://mcb.harvard.edu/gilbert/INTRONMAP]

  4. Protein Data Bank, [http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/]

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Weitzman, J.B. Ancient introns. Genome Biol 2, spotlight-20011113-01 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1186/gb-spotlight-20011113-01

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/gb-spotlight-20011113-01

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