Longer first introns are a general property of eukaryotic gene structure

While many properties of eukaryotic gene structure are well characterized, differences in the form and function of introns that occur at different positions within a transcript are less well understood. In particular, the dynamics of intron length variation with respect to intron position has receiv...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2008-08, Vol.3 (8), p.e3093-e3093
Main Authors: Bradnam, Keith R, Korf, Ian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acids
Analysis
Animals
Annotations
Arabidopsis - genetics
Arabidopsis thaliana
Binding sites
Caenorhabditis elegans - genetics
Computational Biology/Sequence Motif Analysis
Data processing
Databases, Nucleic Acid - organization & administration
Databases, Nucleic Acid - standards
Drosophila
Drosophila melanogaster - genetics
Evolution
Fruit flies
Gene expression
Genes
Genes, Helminth
Genes, Insect
Genes, Plant - genetics
Genetics and Genomics/Bioinformatics
Genetics and Genomics/Gene Function
Genetics and Genomics/Genomics
Genetics and Genomics/Plant Genetics and Gene Expression
Genomes
Information sources
Insects
Introns
Introns - genetics
Reproducibility of Results
Studies
Transcription
Trends
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Summary:While many properties of eukaryotic gene structure are well characterized, differences in the form and function of introns that occur at different positions within a transcript are less well understood. In particular, the dynamics of intron length variation with respect to intron position has received relatively little attention. This study analyzes all available data on intron lengths in GenBank and finds a significant trend of increased length in first introns throughout a wide range of species. This trend was found to be even stronger when using high-confidence gene annotation data for three model organisms (Arabidopsis thaliana, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Drosophila melanogaster) which show that the first intron in the 5' UTR is--on average--significantly longer than all downstream introns within a gene. A partial explanation for increased first intron length in A. thaliana is suggested by the increased frequency of certain motifs that are present in first introns. The phenomenon of longer first introns can potentially be used to improve gene prediction software and also to detect errors in existing gene annotations.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0003093