Journal
JOURNAL OF HEREDITY
Volume 100, Issue 5, Pages 618-623Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/jhered/esp056
Keywords
effective population size; endosymbiosis; group II self-splicing introns; origin of eukaryotes; spliceosomal introns
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Funding
- Intramural Research Program of the DHHS/NIH (National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information)
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Evolutionary reconstructions using maximum likelihood methods point to unexpectedly high densities of introns in protein-coding genes of ancestral eukaryotic forms including the last common ancestor of all extant eukaryotes. Combined with the evidence of the origin of spliceosomal introns from invading Group II self-splicing introns, these results suggest that early ancestral eukaryotic genomes consisted of up to 80% sequences derived from Group II introns, a much greater contribution of introns than that seen in any extant genome. An organism with such an unusual genome architecture could survive only under conditions of a severe population bottleneck.
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