Selection for short introns in highly expressed genes.
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.
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Cristian I
CI
Castillo-Davis
Sergei L
SL
Mekhedov
Daniel L
DL
Hartl
Eugene V
EV
Koonin
Fyodor A
FA
Kondrashov
D000818:Animals; D017173:Caenorhabditis elegans / Q000235:genetics*; D029742:Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D004251:DNA Transposable Elements; D020224:Expressed Sequence Tags; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D007438:Introns; D012641:Selection, Genetic; D014158:Transcription, Genetic
D029742:Caenorhabditis elegans Proteins; D004251:DNA Transposable Elements