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Nucleic Acids Research 2005 33(20):6522-6527; doi:10.1093/nar/gki970
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Published online 27 November 2005

© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved
The online version of this article has been published under an open access model. Users are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate, or display the open access version of this article for non-commercial purposes provided that: the original authorship is properly and fully attributed; the Journal and Oxford University Press are attributed as the original place of publication with the correct citation details given; if an article is subsequently reproduced or disseminated not in its entirety but only in part or as a derivative work this must be clearly indicated. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions{at}oxfordjournals.org

Article

The excess of 5' introns in eukaryotic genomes

Kui Lin* and Da-Yong Zhang

MOE Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering and College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University Beijing 100875, China

*To whom correspondence should be addressed at: College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China. Tel: +86 10 58805045; Fax: +86 10 58807721; Email: linkui{at}bnu.edu.cn

Received September 27, 2005. Revised November 2, 2005. Accepted November 2, 2005.

In this work, 21 completely sequenced eukaryotic genomes were analyzed using an intragene comparison approach. We found that all of these genomes show a significant 5'-biased distribution of introns of protein-coding genes. Our findings are different from previous studies based on the intergene method, where introns are biased towards the 5' end of genes only in intron-poor genomes, but are evenly distributed in intron-rich genomes. In addition, by analyzing the patterns of intron distribution of a set of well-compiled housekeeping genes from human and their respective orthologs identified by a bidirectional best BLAST hit method from the other genomes, we found that the trend of 5'-biased intron positions of the set of housekeeping genes for each genome is much more skewed than that of all genes of the same genome, and rarely if any of the housekeeping genes examined have an extremely 3'-biased position distribution in which all introns of a gene are located only at the 3' portion of the gene. The most parsimonious explanation for our findings may be the model in which intron loss is caused by homologous recombination between the genomic copy of a gene and a reverse transcriptase product of a spliced mRNA.


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