IMR Press / FBL / Volume 9 / Issue 6 / DOI: 10.2741/1478

Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.

Article
A report on single exon genes (SEG) in eukaryotes
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1 School of Mechanical and Production Engineering, NCSV, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
2 Department of Microbiology, National University of Singapore, Singapore
3 Roskamp Institute, 2040 Whitfield Ave, Sarasota FL 34243, USA
4 Department of Psychiatry and Behavior Science, University of Miami Medical School, Miami, FL 33136
Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2004, 9(6), 3262–3267; https://doi.org/10.2741/1478
Published: 1 September 2004
Abstract

Single exon genes (SEG) are archetypical of prokaryotes. Hence, their presence in intron-rich, multi-cellular eukaryotic genomes is perplexing. Consequently, a study on SEG origin and evolution is important. Towards this goal, we took the first initiative of identifying and counting SEG in nine completely sequenced eukaryotic organisms - four of which are unicellular (E. cuniculi, S. cerevisiae, S. pombe, P. falciparum) and five of which are multi-cellular (C. elegans, A. thaliana, D. melanogaster, M. musculus, H. sapiens). This exercise enabled us to compare their proportion in unicellular and multi-cellular genomes. The comparison suggests that the SEG fraction decreases with gene count (r = -0.80) and increases with gene density (r = 0.88) in these genomes. We also examined the distribution patterns of their protein lengths in different genomes.

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