INTRON ORIGINS EXAMINED USING ORGANELLE DERIVED GENES

这项研究的长期目标是了解内含子何时以及如何产生，以及它们的进化史是什么。一种假设认为，许多现存的内含子是古代生物体中使用的古代内含子的残留物，用来洗牌小的外显子模块，从而创造更大的基因。这一内含子早期假说预测相邻内含子将处于与阅读框架相同的阶段。我将分析一个含有最近出现的内含子(从细胞器转移到细胞核的基因)的基因数据库。如果这些基因具有对称的相位相关性，这将表明内含子可能因为外显子改组之外的其他原因而显示出这些相关性，并且这一预测不能用于支持古代的外显子改组假说。古老的内含子改组假说也预测内含子将位于紧凑的3D蛋白质模块之间。我将在上面的数据库中查找这些位置的内含子。如果内含子偏爱非改组基因中的这些模块边界区域，则模块边界预测不能用于支持内含子早期假说。最后，我将把非改组数据库中的内含子密度与其他核基因进行比较。如果这两个数据集中的内含子密度以谱系特定的方式相互反映，这表明原始核基因的内含子很少。由于大多数人类基因包含许多内含子，了解内含子是如何产生的，以及它们的进化历史和用途是巨大的潜在健康益处。许多人类疾病都有与内含子相关的原因。了解内含子是如何传播的可能会导致新的基因治疗技术。鉴于内含子的基本性质，理解它们将极大地增加对我们自己的了解。

The long term objective of this research is to understand when and how introns arose and what their evolutionary history has been. One hypothesis proposes that many extant introns are the vestiges of ancient introns used in ancient organisms to shuffle small exonic modules and thereby create larger genes. This introns-early hypothesis predicts that adjacent introns will be in the same phases relative to the reading frame. I will analyze a database of genes containing introns accepted to have arisen recently (genes transferred from organelles to the nucleus). If these genes have symmetric phase correlations it would suggest that introns could show these correlations for reasons other than exon shuffling and that this prediction can not be used to support the ancient exon shuffling hypothesis. The ancient intron shuffling hypothesis also predicts that introns will lie between compact 3D protein modules. I will look in the above database for introns at these positions. If introns prefer these module boundary regions in the non-shuffled genes the module boundary prediction can not be used to support the introns-early hypothesis. Lastly, I will compare intron densities in the non- shuffled database with other nuclear genes. If the intron densities in these two datasets mirror each other in a lineage specific manner this suggests that the original nuclear genes had few introns. Since most human genes contain many introns the potential health benefits of understanding how introns arose and what their evolutionary history and utility have been are enormous. Numerous human diseases have intron-related causes. Understanding how introns propagate could lead to novel gene therapy techniques. Given the elementary nature of introns, understanding them will greatly increase understanding of ourselves.