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Genome-wide analysis of recombination machinery for spliceosomal introns gain

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Abstract

What caused spliceosomal introns gain remains an unsolved problem. To this, defining what spliceosomal introns arise from is critical. Here, the introns density of the genomes is calculated for four species, indicating:(1) sex chromosomes in mammals have lower intron densities, (2) despite that, the proportion of UTRs (untranslated regions) with introns in sex chromosomes is higher than other ones, and (3) AT content of introns is more similar to that of intergenic regions when these regions comprise the majority of a chromosome, and more similar to that of exons, when exons are the majority of the chromosome. On the other hand, introns have been clearly demonstrated to invade genetic sequences in recent times while sex chromosomes evolved from a pair of autosomes within the last 300 millions years. One main difference between sex chromosomes and autosomes in mammalian is that sex chromosomes recombination stopped. Thus, recombination might be the main determinant for eukaryotes gaining spliceosomal introns. To further prove that and avoid giving weak signal, the whole genomes from eight eukaryotic species are analyzed and present strong signal for above the trend (3) in three species (t-test, P = 0.55 for C. elegans, P = 0.72 for D. melanogaster and P = 0.83 for A. thaliana). These results suggest that the genome-wide coincidence as above (3) can only be caused by the large-scale random unequal crossover in eukaryote meiosis, which might have fueled spliceosomal introns but hardly occurred in prokaryotes.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the supports from the National 973 Project China No. 2007CB707802. Some data were supplied by Bingbing Wang and Vicki L. Chandler from Iowa State University, Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology.

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  1. Division of Biotechnology, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, CAS, 457 Zhongshan Rd, 116023, Dalian, People’s Republic of China

    Haidong Tan

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Correspondence to Haidong Tan.

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Tan, H. Genome-wide analysis of recombination machinery for spliceosomal introns gain. Mol Biol Rep 37, 1551–1557 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-009-9557-8

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