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MBE Advance Access originally published online on July 17, 2006
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2006 23(10):1824-1827; doi:10.1093/molbev/msl061
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Letter

Very Little Intron Gain in Entamoeba histolytica Genes Laterally Transferred from Prokaryotes

Scott William Roy, Manuel Irimia and David Penny

Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

E-mail: scottwroy{at}gmail.com.

The evolution of spliceosomal introns remains intensely debated. We studied 96 Entamoeba histolytica genes previously identified as having been laterally transferred from prokaryotes, which were presumably intronless at the time of transfer. Ninety out of the 96 are also present in the reptile parasite Entamoeba invadens, indicating lateral transfer before the species' divergence ~50 MYA. We find only 2 introns, both shared with E. invadens. Thus, no intron gains have occurred in ~50 Myr, implying a very low rate of intron gain of less than one gain per gene per ~4.5 billion years. Nine other predicted introns are due to annotation errors reflecting apparent mistakes in the E. histolytica genome assembly. These results underscore the massive differences in intron gain rates through evolution.

Key Words: intron gain • genome complexity • genome annotation • lateral gene transfer • parasite evolution


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