Biology Articles » Evolutionary Biology » Selection for the miniaturization of highly expressed genes

Selection for the miniaturization of highly expressed genes

What controls the sizes of genes and their introns? Some people believe that genes with complex expression pattern have coding for longer proteins, and contain more undiscovered regulatory motif in their introns (thus they should have longer introns). And it was found that tissue-specific genes have longer introns and longer CDSs. However, their is a also the idea that the length of introns and the protein are mainly limited by the energy cost, and consistently, people found evidence that highly expressed have short introns and code for short proteins. Our recent paper published in BBRC shows that, tissue-specific genes do not have longer introns or longer proteins than housekeeping genes with similar expression level, while within HK genes, expression level and (intron and protein) length are negatively correlated.

Source: The article was written by Li SW et al and it is recently published in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbrc.2007.06.085.