Abstract
It has been long debated whether spliceosomal introns originated in the common ancestor of eukaryotes and prokaryotes. In this study, we tested the possibility that extant introns were inherited from the common ancestor of eukaryotes and prokaryotes using in silico simulation. We first identified 21 intron positions that are shared among different families of the P-Type ATPase superfamily, some of which are known to have diverged before the separation of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Theoretical estimates of the expected number of intron positions shared by different genes suggest that the introns at those 21 positions were inserted independently. There seems to be no intron that arose from before the diversification of the P-Type ATPase superfamily. Namely, the present introns were inserted after the separation of eukaryotes and prokaryotes.
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Supplemental Data 1
Alignment of amino acids used in this study. Amino acids given in upper-case letters were used under the strict rule, while under the generous rule, amino acids given in upper- and lower-case letters, except for “x”, were used. The letter “x” represents amino acids which were not used in any calculations. (FAS 2540 kb)
Supplemental Table 1
Positions of introns found in the P-Type ATPase genes and the names of genes which have introns at these positions. The first column indicates positions of nucleotides before the introns, and the second column indicates positions of nucleotides after the introns. The third and subsequent columns indicate the names of genes. (XLS 114 kb)
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Oda, T., Ohniwa, R.L., Suzuki, Y. et al. Evolutionary dynamics of spliceosomal intron revealed by in silico analyses of the P-Type ATPase superfamily genes. Mol Biol Rep 38, 2285–2293 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-010-0360-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-010-0360-3