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PMID: 15254274 Published · epublish English Journal Article

Prevalence of intron gain over intron loss in the evolution of paralogous gene families.

Nucleic acids research ·Vol. 32 ·No. 12 ·2004-00-00 ·Pages 3724-33

Babenko VN, Rogozin IB, Mekhedov SL, Koonin EV

Abstract

The mechanisms and evolutionary dynamics of intron insertion and loss in eukaryotic genes remain poorly understood. Reconstruction of parsimonious scenarios of gene structure evolution in paralogous gene families in animals and plants revealed numerous gains and losses of introns. In all analyzed lineages, the number of acquired new introns was substantially greater than the number of lost ancestral introns. This trend held even for lineages in which vertical evolution of genes involved more intron losses than gains, suggesting that gene duplication boosts intron insertion. However, dating gene duplications and the associated intron gains and losses based on the molecular clock assumption showed that very few, if any, introns were gained during the last approximately 100 million years of animal and plant evolution, in agreement with previous conclusions reached through analysis of orthologous gene sets. These results are generally compatible with the emerging notion of intensive insertion and loss of introns during transitional epochs in contrast to the relative quiet of the intervening evolutionary spans.

MeSH Terms
Amino Acid Sequence Animals Evolution, Molecular Introns Molecular Sequence Data Multigene Family Mutagenesis, Insertional Plants/genetics Sequence Deletion Sequence Homology, Amino Acid
Authors & Affiliations
4 authors, click to expand affiliations / ORCID
Babenko Vladimir N
National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bldg 38A, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA.
Rogozin Igor B
Mekhedov Sergei L
Koonin Eugene V
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Article Info
Journal
Nucleic acids research
Abbr.
Nucleic Acids Res
ISSN
1362-4962
DOI
10.1093/nar/gkh686
Published
2004-00-00
Epub
2004-00-14
Pages
3724-33
Language
English
Region
England
NLM ID
0411011
PMCID
PMC484173
Subset
IM
External Links
PubMed source DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkh686 PMC Full Text View journal details
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