Evidence against the energetic cost hypothesis for the short introns in highly expressed genes.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In 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.

Results

In 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 hypothesi

SUBMITTER: Huang YF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2424036 | biostudies-literature | 2008 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature