A research team from Whitehead Institute has uncovered a surprising and previously unrecognized role for introns, the parts of genes that lack the instructions for making proteins and are typically ...

Spliceosomal introns are noncoding DNA sequences located between exons in many eukaryotic protein-coding genes. Most are removed post-transcriptionally by RNA splicing and do not encode proteins, but ...

One of the most long-standing, fundamental mysteries of biology surrounds the poorly understood origins of introns. Introns are segments of noncoding DNA that must be removed from the genetic code ...

The origin of the eukaryotic nucleus marked a seminal evolutionary transition. We propose that the nuclear envelope's incipient function was to allow mRNA splicing, which is slow, to go to completion ...

A new study points to introners, one of several proposed mechanisms for the creation of introns, as an explanation for the origins of most introns across species. One of the most long-standing, ...

Scientists at the University of California, Davis have discovered that DNA sequences thought to be essential for gene activity can be expendable. Sequences once called junk sometimes call the shots ...

UConn Health researcher Arthur Günzl has received a $450,000 grant from the NIAID to investigate the role of introns in a class of parasites responsible for several tropical human diseases: sleeping ...

The sequences of nonsense DNA that interrupt genes could be far more important to the evolution of genomes than previously thought, according to researchers. Their study of the model organism Daphnia ...

Researchers have long puzzled over why many eukaryotic protein-coding genes are interspersed with segments of noncoding DNA that have no obvious biological function. These so-called introns are ...

Scientists have discovered that some tiny segments of RNA thought to be junk instead have a functional role in suppressing production of certain messenger RNAs and appear to help cells respond to ...

In a recent study of genes involved in brain functioning, their previously unknown features have been uncovered by bioinformaticians from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the ...