Functional and evolutionary analyses on expressed intronless genes in the mouse genome.
Using computational approaches we have identified 2017 expressed intronless genes in the mouse genome. Evolutionary analysis reveals that 56 intronless genes are conserved among the three domains of life--bacteria, archea and eukaryotes. These highly conserved intronless genes were found to be involved in essential housekeeping functions. About 80% of expressed mouse intronless genes have orthologs in eukaryotic genomes only, and thus are specific to eukaryotic organisms. 608 of these genes have intronless human orthologs and 302 of these orthologs have a match in OMIM database. Investigation into these mouse genes will be important in generating mouse models for understanding human diseases.
Sakharkar
Kishore Ramaji
KR
National University Medical Institutes, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Sakharkar
Meena Kishore
MK
Culiat
Cymbeline T
CT
Chow
Vincent T K
VT
Pervaiz
Shazib
S
D000818:Animals; D030561:Databases, Nucleic Acid; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005796:Genes / Q000502:physiology; D016678:Genome; D006801:Humans; D007438:Introns; D051379:Mice / Q000235:genetics*; D017385:Sequence Homology; D013045:Species Specificity