Minimal Introns Are Not “Junk”
- Jun Yu1,2,3,5,6,
- Zhiyong Yang4,5,
- Miho Kibukawa1,
- Marcia Paddock1,
- Douglas A. Passey1, and
- Gane Ka-Shu Wong1,2,3
- 1University of Washington Genome Center, Department of Medicine, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA; 2Hangzhou Genomics Institute, Institute of Bioinformatics of Zhejiang University, Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou 310007, China; 3Beijing Genomics Institute, Center of Genomics and Bioinformatics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 101300, China; 4Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Royal Melbourne Hospital, Victoria 3050, Australia.
Abstract
Intron-size distributions for most multicellular (and some unicellular) eukaryotes have a sharp peak at their “minimal intron” size. Across the human population, these minimal introns exhibit an abundance of insertion-deletion polymorphisms, the effect of which is to maintain their optimal size. We argue that minimal introns affect function by enhancing the rate at which mRNA is exported from the cell nucleus.
