title: Entropic contributions to the splicing process.
abstract: It has been recently argued that depletion attraction may play an important role in different aspects of cellular organization, ranging from the organization of transcriptional activity in transcription factories to the formation of nuclear bodies. In this paper, we suggest a new application of these ideas in the context of the splicing process, a crucial step of messenger RNA maturation in eukaryotes. We shall show that entropy effects and the resulting depletion attraction may explain the relevance of the aspecific intron length variable in the choice of splice-site recognition modality. On top of that, some qualitative features of the genome architecture of higher eukaryotes can find evolutionary realistic motivation in the light of our model.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Fisica Teorica and INFN, Università degli Studi di Torino, v. Pietro Giuria 1, 10125 Torino, Italy. mosella@to.infn.it
authors.forename: Matteo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Osella
authors.forename: Michele
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Caselle
mesh_terms: D019277:Entropy; D056890:Eukaryota / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D008954:Models, Biological; D012326:RNA Splicing; D012333:RNA, Messenger / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*
chemical_list: D012333:RNA, Messenger