1233421
doi
10.1038/ng940
oai:zenodo.org:1233421
Mekhedov, Sergei L.
Hartl, Daniel L.
Koonin, Eugene V.
Kondrashov, Fyodor A.
Selection for Short Introns in Highly Expressed Genes
Castillo Davis, Cristian I.
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode
Transcription is a slow and expensive process: in eukaryotes, approximately 20 nucleotides can be transcribed per second at the expense of at least two ATP molecules per nucleotide. Thus, at least for highly expressed genes, transcription of long introns, which are particularly common in mammals, is costly. Using data on the expression of genes that encode proteins in Caenorhabditis elegans and Homo sapiens, we show that introns in highly expressed genes are substantially shorter than those in genes that are expressed at low levels. This difference is greater in humans, such that introns are, on average, 14 times shorter in highly expressed genes than in genes with low expression, whereas in C. elegans the difference in intron length is only twofold. In contrast, the density of introns in a gene does not strongly depend on the level of gene expression. Thus, natural selection appears to favor short introns in highly expressed genes to minimize the cost of transcription and other molecular processes, such as splicing.
Zenodo
2002-09-01
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
1233420
1579538914.703667
257014
md5:65f3f7d4c0af53c9211e0834c5128bba
https://zenodo.org/records/1233421/files/article.pdf
public