title: Pushing back the expansion of introns in animal genomes.
abstract: In a recent paper in Science, surveyed the position of introns in 30 genes of a marine annelid and showed that over 60% of the introns occupy positions identical to those in human homologs. In contrast, both human and marine annelid genes share only 30% of their introns with other invertebrates. These observations suggest that the common ancestor of most animal phyla had intron-rich genes and reinforce the notion that introns proliferated early in the evolutionary history of eukaryotes.
authors.affiliation: Center for Evolutionary Functional Genomics, Biodesign Institute, and School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA. s.kumar@asu.edu
authors.forename: Sudhir
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.forename: S Blair
authors.initials: SB
authors.lastname: Hedges
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000845:Annelida / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D016678:Genome; D006801:Humans; D007438:Introns / Q000235:genetics; D010802:Phylogeny