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Compact genes are highly expressed in the moss Physcomitrella patens
Author(s) -
STENØIEN H. K.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of evolutionary biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.289
H-Index - 128
eISSN - 1420-9101
pISSN - 1010-061X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01301.x
Subject(s) - physcomitrella patens , biology , gene , intron , genome , genetics , arabidopsis thaliana , oryza sativa , arabidopsis , ploidy , selection (genetic algorithm) , artificial intelligence , mutant , computer science
Abstract Compact genes contain short and few introns, and they are highly expressed in different animal genomes. Recently, it has been shown that in Oryza sativa and Arabidopsis thaliana , highly expressed genes tend to be least compact, containing long and many introns. It has been suggested that selection on genome organization may have acted differently in plants compared with animals. Gene expression can be estimated as the number of hits when comparing a gene sequence with publicly available expressed sequence tags. Here it is shown that in the haploid moss Physcomitrella pates , highly expressed genes contain shorter introns than genes with low expression levels. This study therefore supports the hypothesis that selection may strongly favour transcriptional efficiency at least in the haploid phase of plant life cycles. It is concluded that plants do not necessarily respond to other selection pressures than animals regarding genome structuring.