Introduction
Introns were first discovered in protein-coding genes of adenovirus, and were subsequently identified in genes encoding transfer RNA and ribosomal RNA genes. Introns are now known to occur within a wide variety of genes throughout organisms and viruses within all of the biological kingdoms.
The fact that genes were split or interrupted by introns was discovered independently in 1977 by Phillip Allen Sharp and Richard J. Roberts, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1993. The term intron was introduced by American biochemist Walter Gilbert:
"The notion of the cistron must be replaced by that of a transcription unit containing regions which will be lost from the mature messenger - which I suggest we call introns (for intragenic regions) - alternating with regions which will be expressed - exons." (Gilbert 1978)
The frequency of introns within different genomes is observed to vary widely across the spectrum of biological organisms. For example, introns are extremely common within the nuclear genome of higher vertebrates (e.g. humans and mice), where protein-coding genes almost always contain multiple introns, while introns are rare within the nuclear genes of some eukaryotic microorganisms, for example baker's/brewer's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). In contrast, the mitochondrial genomes of vertebrates are entirely devoid of introns, while those of eukaryotic microorganisms may contain many introns. Introns are well known in bacterial and archaeal genes, but occur more rarely than in most eukaryotic genomes.
Read more about this topic: Intron
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