Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 7, 2026

A Reporter Assay to Analyze Intronic microRNA Maturation in Mammalian Cells
Published on: June 16, 2022
The role of introns in repeat protein gene formation
Timothy O Street1, George D Rose, Doug Barrick
1T.C. Jenkins Department of Biophysics, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
Abstract:
Genes composed of tandem repetitive sequence motifs are abundant in nature and are enriched in eukaryotes. To investigate repeat protein gene formation mechanisms, we have conducted a large-scale analysis of their introns and exons. We find that a wide variety of repeat motifs exhibit a striking conservation of intron position and phase, and are composed of exons that encode one or two complete repeats. These results suggest a simple model of repeat protein gene formation from local duplications. This model is corroborated by amino acid sequence similarity patterns among neighboring repeats from various repeat protein genes. The distribution of one- and two-repeat exons indicates that intron-facilitated repeat motif duplication, in which the start and end points of duplication are located in consecutive intronic regions, significantly exceeds intron-independent duplication. These results suggest that introns have contributed to the greater abundance of repeat protein genes in eukaryotic versus prokaryotic organisms, a conclusion that is supported by taxonomic analysis.
Related Concept Videos
Exon Recombination
Exon shuffling follows “splice frame rules.” Each exon has three reading...
RNA Splicing
RNA Splicing
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...
Inheritance of Chromatin Structures

