Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 23, 2026

Identification of Alternative Splicing and Polyadenylation in RNA-seq Data
Published on: June 24, 2021
Distributions of exons and introns in the human genome
Meena Kishore Sakharkar1, Vincent T K Chow, Pandjassarame Kangueane
1Nanyang Centre for Supercomputing and Visualisation, N3-2c-113b, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. mmeena@ntu.edu.sg
Abstract:
The human genome is revisited using exon and intron distribution profiles. The 26,564 annotated genes in the human genome (build October, 2003) contain 233,785 exons and 207,344 introns. On average, there are 8.8 exons and 7.8 introns per gene. About 80% of the exons on each chromosome are < 200 bp in length. < 0.01% of the introns are < 20 bp in length and < 10% of introns are more than 11,000 bp in length. These results suggest constraints on the splicing machinery to splice out very long or very short introns and provide insight to optimal intron length selection. Interestingly, the total length in introns and intergenic DNA on each chromosome is significantly correlated to the determined chromosome size with a coefficient of correlation r = 0.95 and r = 0.97, respectively. These results suggest their implication in genome design.
Related Concept Videos
Organization of Genes
Organization of Genes
Exon Recombination
Exon shuffling follows “splice frame rules.” Each exon has three reading...
Alternative RNA Splicing
There are five types of alternative RNA splicing that vary in the ways the pre-mRNA segments are removed or retained in the mature mRNA. The first...
Alternative RNA Splicing
There are five types of alternative RNA splicing that vary in the ways the pre-mRNA segments are removed or retained in the mature mRNA. The first...
RNA Splicing
