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We published an evaluation in November from Guilhem Janbon at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, of a paper that reported a surprising new mechanism for evolutionary intron loss (free link to F1000 evaluation: you can read the original paper in Science).

I invited first author Quinn Mitrovich to talk to us about the paper and his current research (see the video below). What Quinn and his colleagues at UCSF have found is that, compared with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a class of genes that encode non-coding RNAs in the pathogenic yeast Candida albicans contains a surprising number of introns. Quinn says that there was a massive purging of introns from Saccharomyces after the evolutionary split from Candida, but rather than just disappearing from the genome, they were converted to exons through loss of splice sites. He says that by focussing on different kinds of genes (non-coding versus protein-coding) it’s possible to learn more about the way genes and genomes involved.

Now, Quinn is trying to answer the “fundamental unanswered question” in his paper: what exactly was the mechanism that drove the evolutionary loss of these introns?

That simple model is not correct