
Messy Genomes: Did They Evolve?
December 14, 2009
The genomes of most eukaryotes are riddled with introns – intragenic regions – that have to be cut out by sophisticated DNA-transcribing machinery so that the true gene sections (called exons) can be spliced together. Introns can vary from 20 base pairs to over 500,000 – significantly impacting the energy required to duplicate the genome. […]