'Why genomes in pieces?' revisited: sucking lice do their own thing in mtDNA circle game.

摘要

About 30 yr ago, an organizational nightmare emerged in the budding field of genomics. Several independent groups discovered that the genetic information encoding genes was not arranged in a continuous linear format of adjacent nucleotides. To everyone's surprise, the coding information for proteins was interrupted by noncoding sequences that were removed from initial RNA transcripts before translation continued the job of the central dogma: information transfer from DNA to RNA to protein. Walter Gilbert made sense of all of this (Gilbert 1978) when, in a few hundred words, he coined the terms intron and exon, predicted that the protein coding content of genomes would comprise only a fraction of the total DNA, triggered the "introns-early" versus "introns-late" debate, and set the seed for the notion that RNA was the early form genetic material.