ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2008
Evidence against the energetic cost hypothesis for the short introns in highly expressed genes.
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Regulatory activity is the default DNA state in eukaryotes.Nature structural & molecular biology · 2024Article
- Architecture and Distribution of Introns in Core Genes of FourG3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2017Article
- Negative Glucocorticoid Response-Like Element from the First Intron of the Chicken Growth Hormone Gene Represses Gene Expression in the Rat Pituitary Tumor Cell Line.International journal of molecular sciences · 2016Article
- Non-coding RNA: what is functional and what is junk?Frontiers in genetics · 2015Article
- Article
- Frequency of intron loss correlates with processed pseudogene abundance: a novel strategy to test the reverse transcriptase model of intron loss.BMC biology · 2013Article
- Three independent determinants of protein evolutionary rate.Journal of molecular evolution · 2013Review
- Association of intron loss with high mutation rate in Arabidopsis: implications for genome size evolution.Genome biology and evolution · 2013Article
- Why eukaryotic cells use introns to enhance gene expression: splicing reduces transcription-associated mutagenesis by inhibiting topoisomerase I cutting activity.Biology direct · 2011Article
- Spliceosomal intron size expansion in domesticated grapevine (Vitis vinifera).BMC research notes · 2011Article
- Selection for the compactness of highly expressed genes in Gallus gallus.Biology direct · 2010Article
- In plants, expression breadth and expression level distinctly and non-linearly correlate with gene structure.Biology direct · 2009Article
- Exon definition as a potential negative force against intron losses in evolution.Biology direct · 2008Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundIn animals, the moss Physcomitrella patens and the pollen of Arabidopsis thaliana, highly expressed genes have shorter introns than weakly expressed genes. A popular explanation for this is selection for transcription efficiency, which includes two sub-hypotheses: to minimize the energetic cost or to minimize the time cost.
resultsIn an individual human, different organs may differ up to hundreds of times in cell number (for example, a liver versus a hypothalamus). Considered at the individual level, a gene specifically expressed in a large organ is actually transcribed tens or hundreds of times more than a gene with a similar expression level (a measure of mRNA abundance per cell) specifically expressed in a small organ. According to the energetic cost hypothesis, the former should have shorter introns than the latter. However, in humans and mice we have not found significant differences in intron length between large-tissue/organ-specific genes and small-tissue/organ-specific genes with similar expression levels. Qualitative estimation shows that the deleterious effect (that is, the energetic burden) of long introns in highly expressed genes is too negligible to be efficiently selected against in mammals.
conclusionThe short introns in highly expressed genes should not be attributed to energy constraint. We evaluated evidence for the time cost hypothesis and other alternatives.
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