Eukaryotic evolution: early origin of canonical introns.
basic_science · Level V
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Abstract
Spliceosomal introns, one of the hallmarks of eukaryotic genomes, were thought to have originated late in evolution and were assumed not to exist in eukaryotes that diverged early -- until the discovery of a single intron with an aberrant splice boundary in the primitive 'protozoan' Giardia. Here we describe introns from a close relative of Giardia, Carpediemonas membranifera, that have boundary sequences of the normal eukaryotic type, indicating that canonical introns are likely to have arisen very early in eukaryotic evolution.